The Wizard of Oz

"If I pour water on it, will it melt too?"

Somewhere over the rainbow way up high, there’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby

A tornado hits a small Kansas farm and Dorothy gets whisked off to the magical land of Oz where her dog Toto promptly gets kidnapped by the wicked witch. What’s a girl to do? Deliver some ruby slippers to a wizard, of course. At least that's what the game would have you believe. Welcome to the Wizard of Oz, which is in every respect a confusing and frustrating failure that should never have been made.

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can’t I?

Better for us all if Dorothy had just flown right back over the rainbow where she came from. But instead we are forced to take her through the most pointless assortment of levels that have only a tenuous link with either the movie or the book. When I think Wizard of Oz, an action platformer isn’t the first genre that I would associate with it. And indeed this ill-fated merger comes off as simply ludicrous. Dorothy Warrior Princess wields a little wand with a star on top that she strangely never actually uses. No, instead she kicks weakly at enemies or if she’s lucky finds some unidentified yellow squares to chuck at them. The point of each level is to search for the elusive “ticket pieces” which will be used to enter the Emerald City later. Which brings up the question why are the tickets in pieces in the first place and why has someone hidden them? There are also little colored bricks suspended in the air that you must pick up to make a road across a chasm that leads to the next “land.”

There are four lands in the game, each broken up into several smaller levels. Four lands are too many. One land is too many also, but four is WAY too many. Why? Because after the first land, the levels just get recycled again in the second, third and fourth with the platforms moved around to different places. Maybe they thought we wouldn’t notice the fact that we’re going through the same level with the same background, enemies and music except that you’re collecting different colored bricks each time and jumping in a slightly different order.

The levels themselves are totally asinine and poorly thought out so that there are ways to cheat and bypass things in almost all of them. The downside is that there are also ways to get stuck and die due to bad planning that can leave you stranded on a platform with nowhere else to jump to. Among the stellar level designs are: a forest with trees that you can jump up into, but why would you want to do that and get attacked by killer bluebirds and bees when you can just jump down into the swamp and walk along the bottom of the screen bypassing everything? There’s a river where you must jump onto tiny platforms to make it across, a poppy field where you jump among the leaves of the poppies, a city where you jump around between houses, and that’s pretty much it.

Getting through the levels is absolute and utter hell. They’re either stupidly easy and boring and you can finish them in about 20 seconds simply by walking from one end to another, or they’re long and difficult jumping levels that are next to impossible to complete because of a superb game glitch (or lazy programming, or whatever) which enables characters to regularly fall straight through platforms. Yes, that’s right. Let’s spend a bit of time on this since it’s quite a major issue in a so-called platformer. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, and believe me I’ve tried to work it out. It seems that about 90% of the time you have success if you land squarely in the middle of the platform after approaching it directly from above. But jumping from an angle is next to suicide. You won’t make it. Dorothy will pass straight through the platform and continue on to her death. So about the only way you can beat the game is by using these little winged shoes that Dorothy can pick up which let her hover in mid-air for about 5 seconds, then drop straight to the ground. Using the shoes, you can position her directly above a platform, then drop her down so she won’t fall through. The shoes have limited uses though, and you have to keep replaying through the levels in which they are found in order to get a pair to use in the subsequent levels. Why did I bother? Because by this point I was determined to finish the bloody game so I could view the credits screen, copy down the names of everyone involved, and send each and every one of them a spectacular piece of hate mail. Oh and let me not forget the ice cavern levels (gee I must have fallen asleep during that part of the movie) where you can happily fall through not only the platforms, but the floor itself!

Sometimes in the level you’ll find a hovering dog bone, and touching it will bring on a mini-game involving Toto. Remember Toto? He was that dog who got kidnapped a while back but we aren’t making any sort of effort to rescue. For some reason the mini-game takes place high in the air and involves making Toto jump to various squares in a certain order to make it to the “End” square in a very weak attempt at a puzzle element. One wrong move and little Toto falls off the square and plunges several thousand feet to the hard, hard ground below. Seeing the little dog spiral downwards getting farther and farther away is enough to give anyone nightmares for weeks afterward.

Where troubles melt like lemondops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me

Be it horrible pun or unintended slightly funny coincidence, one of the main enemies you’ll encounter are lemons that drop out of trees at you. (lemondrops…lemons dropping…get it?). Also, apparently bluebirds are actually nasty little mean creatures that like to fly out of nowhere and attack. The movie was wrong again. Oz is also full of walking cacti, cornstalks on unicycles that throw corn at you, killer bouncing pumpkins, possessed armchairs and giant sets of aggressive false teeth. Eventually you’ll encounter the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion who will help you battle these fearsome foes. Of course, there is no text or character interaction to tell you why they have suddenly decided to come along. The Scarecrow can kill things with a pitchfork, but uses a different attack button than Dorothy to make things more confusing. The Tinman can kick or use his axe, but can’t jump so is next to useless. The Cowardly Lion can use his claws and is actually quite good. He’s the reason the game deserves a 1 and not a 0 or some sort of negative integer. Although he looks more like an overweight bear than a lion, he has decent attack and jumping capabilities that make the game the most bearable playing with him, and he has a cute way of holding his tail as he walks and covering his eyes like a little scaredy-cat as he did in the movie.

Some day I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me

In keeping with the established trend, the audio in Wizard of Oz is also dreadful. I counted three sound effects in the entire game. A boing sound for jumping on mushrooms (don’t ask), a dull thud for whenever a character takes damage or hits anything, and a dog bark for whenever something is selected in a menu. The music is equally horrible and sounds like it was composed by a ten year old (not the child-prodigy type of ten year old, but the other kind). Listening to this garbage is the kind of thing that could drive one slowly insane, as the tunes systematically break all the rules of aesthetics, harmony and good voice-leading. Many of the songs were adapted straight from the movie but the “composer” couldn’t even handle making arrangements of music that was written by other people. Butchering other peoples’ songs is truly pathetic, and comes from ignorance and not knowing when to leave well enough alone. But instead of just shutting up and transcribing the wonderful music from the movie soundtrack, the “composer” saw fit to “spruce up” the tunes by adding in his own little embellishments. The result is hideous.

And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true

After dying many times, swearing, calming down, playing again, dying, resisting the urge to smash my innocent controller to bits, calming down, dying, looking up a code on gamefaqs, entering the code, and winning, I was treated to an exceptionally lame ending but by now I wasn’t at all surprised. Apparently only Dorothy deserves to get what she wants and the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion don’t get jack. Too bad. Oh, and Toto magically comes back. As I watched the credits, my suspicions were confirmed. The “development team” consisted of about five people, two of which were supposedly testers, but I think they switched the headings around or something. I ripped the cartridge out of my system and observed the Nintendo Seal of Quality shining brightly on the front. Now at least I know where all the development money went.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 10/15/02, Updated 05/06/03