Wonderful Wonderboy,Washing-up and why I Wonder if anyone reads this

Feck its been a whole week since I avoided thinking like an adult member of society and instead gesculated wildly about some ancient video game.
Well bye bye thoughts of mortgages, and carpets and the evergrowing pile of washing up , and hello Wonderboy

Wonderboy , yesterday

Despite sounding like it should be the title of a gay porn movie , and actually being the title of a Tenacious D song , wonderboy was sega's ...er wonderboy of the eigties and early nineties in the arcades.
Their reply to Mario , it featured a bobble headed (rather aryan looking actually ) youth legging it across variously themed levels.Its pure twitch game play , with a timer constantly counting you down , you have to keep running , jumping , timing your leaps to perfection. They was a tacked on plot about saving your girly , and some nice power ups , a skateboard(with helmet, skate safe kids!) and some axes, oh and you got a bonus for collecting ridiculously hard to get dolls at the end of each level.It was an instant classic and contributed strongly to my wrists being in the state they're in (from video game playing! no sniggering down the back)

The kids demanded a sequel (well probably)

WonderboyII had WB jumping , well literally, into action again , but things had been spiced up with some role playing action added , you could now buy weapons and armour and build up your health by collecting coins , it was still an arcade game , so you had a dirty great timer counting you down , (to keep you pumping in those 10ps).

despite wearing hot pink armour and being called wonderboy,
no one ever questioned his sexual orientation

WB's third outing was on home consoles , Wonder boy 3 (the dragons trap), had you , er well trapped by a dragon (intriguingly the game starts with a replay of the second one which had an ...er dirty great dragon at the end )who curses wb and turns him into a succession of animals.Rather handy as you use these creatures different abilities to help you finish the game :mouse WB can fit into tiny spaces , Hawk WB can fly, Pig WB can roll around in his own filth , and Sheep WB can waggle his fleece to lure farmers out of...er ok maybe not.

wb and his mighty nose shield

Sega , either not wanting to overplay their hand , or just because they're plain crazy made WB4 a sort of shoot em up style game , bearing feck all resembalance to the others ..its shite so I'll close my eyes and pretend it never happened ..la la la

1992: Reservoir Dogs blasts onto the screen,KLF still havent burnt a million quid yet, dr_b is trying to grow his beard (badly) for the first time and WB in monsterland is released, looking decent with its new fancydan 16 bit graphics , and taking up most of my summer.
Similarly to the last two,WB5 further developed the "build up money from killing weak bad guys , buy weapons with it , use them to kill slightly bigger bad guys , to buy a slighly better weapon and so on " theme. You 've had the shoot-em-up , the beat-em-up , kids! its the protestant-work-ethic-em-up.Skill players could finish it in a week with out resorting to all that , dr_b spent six months killing toadstools and grubbing around for gold pieces(hey it took my mind off how badly my beard was going ok )

as tiny and hard to make out as my beard circa 92, its a WB5 pic

And that was that for WB, he hung up his sandals, and his mythril sword of doom (the product of killing oh about 8654 toadstools for gold by the way )
and went to that gray limbo old videogames inhabit , (or as we call it here Courtown)

I've always thought it weird that sega never dusted him off to compete with mario when the plumber went 3d , it would have been perfect
anyway in the words of that (unrelated)song :

Wonderboy, what is the secret of your power?
Wonderboy, won't you take me far away from the mucky-muck man?

...erm maybe not .....

for more WB related tomfoolery :
http://www.geocities.com/wonderboyland/ (not as dodgy as it sounds)

http://www.emucamp.com/monsterworld/games.htm