Wardner - Genesis version. What a shame I can't find any discussion on this game in the forum. I must have first played this around 2010 or earlier when I bought the Mega Drive game off of here or wolfgames.com? I can't recall. Anyways I really enjoyed this game back then and I'm glad I still do.
I guess this might have been the first Toaplan game I ever played. There's a lot to love about this game - it's just a really solid platformer with some odd quirks, I think the biggest being the contrast between the main character and the world he's in. The main character is just some plump kid and the music is very happy-go-lucky but some of the enemies are frightful, and there's even blood stains on the wall in the second level. The second level boss has a gruesome transformation from a girl into a spider woman, the animation on it is sick with all the legs popping out of it and then walking! The end boss himself, the titular Wardner, looks like a demon straght from hell.
The game design feels amateur-ish in some places - there is a single jump power up that lets you jump high once, ONCE, to get some gold. It's the only time that power up appears in the entire game. It's a funny detail that makes me wonder if Toaplan put it in there as a joke, like maybe a boss said the game needs a power up so the team obliged with this? It's just a funny, very small detail that you wouldn't think twice of going through the first time. But I've gone through and beat the game multiple times this week so now I see how ridiculous it is.
The game even has that kind of bullshit Easter egg games were known for back then. In one of the levels there's a woman who says to kill the monster in the above room and she'll take you to a shortcut, I did this so many time and went back to her but nothing happened. Finally went on Gamefaqs and found out I had to jump over the monster's attacks eight times, and then let him follow me out a door where he explodes. How the hell would anyone know that?! Who the hell figured that out? After that go back to the woman and she says you're very smart and transports you through the wall. I love this kind of stupid shit.
This is a platformer in a post Ghosts 'n Goblins world but also before Ghouls 'n Ghosts. The physics feel good, and Toaplan even made it so your character drops straight down after falling for a half second so that you can't change trajectory. After each stage you can buy power ups for your shot, and unfortunately you can't beat the game unless you buy the strongest weapon - maybe they learned from Capcom how to milk it like with Ghosts 'n Goblins.
Although it's difficult at some parts the challenge is well-balanced and very forgiving, for example when you die you keep your shot power-ups and restart close to where you died, so no checkpoints or restarting at the beginning of the stage shenanigans.
This game has stayed in the back of my mind for a long time and I've played through it already multiple times in the past week and can run through it in about 20-ish minutes. This is probably the most anyone has talked about Wardner on the internet in a long time. Anyways, I've never played the arcade original but looking at an arcade longplay the Genesis game might be superior simply because of the addition of bosses as well as making some of the levels longer.
I guess Toaplan had nothing to do with the Genesis port, instead it was handled by the engimatic Mentrix Software, who I only know from Calibur .50.
