by Mal Gilliot, Steve Evans
William Wobbler is a weird and cute platform-maze-arcade/adventure with big sprites and great quantities of colours, matched only by the marked presence of colour clash. A sort of Tyrannosaurus Rex In Strangeland, beginning with a fall through a trapdoor into this peculiar underworld dwelled by flying toads, killer snails, undefined creatures which can only be defeated with a love potion [or maybe they're bunnies] and more trapdoors and even more holes, and a long row of craters or hollow trunks, to jump into.
Apparently, you must collect a series of eggs, for whatever reason, and in order to do so you have to find keys and other items to gain access to all the portions of this vertical maze.
It's clearly flawed, starting with the fact that's it's a conversion from the Crappodore 64, or that the same key is used both for picking up items and for jumping, which causes you to leap around stupidly quite a bit, because you need a pixel perfect position to achieve the picking up, or even to climb up or down the lianas or whatever, or that it only takes one contact with one of the other characters to immediately die and have to restart it all from scratch. In spite of that, I found it quite enjoyable and funny, contrarily to the magazines and reviewers of the time, or even of this time, having a bad average vote in WoS too.
3,5/5 if not 4/5
edit:
no more than 3/5
[11/04/2019]
Review by YOR on 12 Dec 2021 (Rating: 2)
This is a super odd game and one I found to be totally unplayable. The graphics are quite nice and they're colourful but the gameplay is just bad. Why does jump and pick up have to be the same button? He looks like an absolute twit jumping to pick up a key. And what is with his bloody neck? Also if you press space there's a space shooter mini-game for some reason which seems to have absolutely no relevance to the game whatsoever. And there's no sound effects at all. Oh and it's the only game Wizard Computer Games released on the Spectrum and the only game Mal Gilliot is credited for. It also has Steve Evans credited wrote did the excellent Who Dares Wins II as well as Microball, a really good Pinball game, and he also produced this monstrosity, and by monstrosity I mean Willie Wobbler's grotesque neck.
