Hi there!

Early in 1990 the sequel to Wonder Boy arrived on the C64:

And while the C64 verion is technically inferior to its Sega Master or PC-Engine counterparts, it's still surprisingly fun. Another surprise fact I never realized before doing some research for this article: This Adventure of Link style adventure game is actually an arcade conversion

I really missed this somehow. From the Arcades I only remember the original Wonder Boy and the shoot'em up Wonder Boy III. (There's another Wonder Boy III that's a sequel to Monsterland at hands ). At the time I think Sega was desperately trying to establish their "Mario". Before finally succeeding with Sonic, they tried some with Alex Kidd and Wonder Boy.

Now, Wonder Boy in Monsterland is a jump'n'slash game, spiced up with a couple of RPG like stats and upgradeable equipment. It's really got much more in common with the aforementioned second NES Zelda, than with the first Wonder Boy game.

As far as I can tell the C64 version is mostly feature complete and pretty good playable. In fact I think this has been the most fun Sega game I featured in "Playing..." so far

I'm not too happy with the visuals of the conversion though: The scrolling is jittery and the graphics could look a lot better I think - especially when considering that the game is loading every new scene from disk. The audio is better again, delivering nothing outstanding but at least the standard SID quality.

I found the actual end sequence after 11 rounds quite disappointing, so here's a screenshot of the final battle against the end-of-game dragon instead:

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Sega arcade conversion in the form of "Turbo Out Run", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel