The Great Waldo Search (Mega Drive)

 Under normal circumstances, I'm a defender of short games. One of my most-loved games is the Mega Drive port of Altered Beast, and with a bit of practice, you can reliably get through it in under ten minutes. Something a little different, however, is The Great Waldo Search: the first time I loaded it up, I'd seen the ending in a similarly short time. I didn't measure it, but I was sure it was under twenty minutes. Then a few days later, I did it again to take screenshots, and the time stamps in the file names of those screenshots revealed my completion time: eight minutes from title screen to ending!

 

Thanks to the American obsession with pointlessly changing the names of things, it might not be immediately obvious from the title that this is a game based on the Where's Wally books (or possibly, the TV cartoon that was also based on them, since there's a beepy-boop over of that show's theme song. Rather than just put Wally into a generic platform game, I can say that they at least tried something a bit more interesting in attempting to turn the "finding stuff in a busy picture" gimmick of the books into a videogame. Unfortunately, I think the developers were a little ahead of their time on this.

 

The problem is that the technology isn't really up to the task. It's not just the Mega Drive's fault, but I think this kind of game is one of very few that really needs to have a HD display to work. Remember all those hidden object games that old women were playing about ten to fifteen years ago? They wouldn't have worked on an old standard definition TV, either. So, there's a few stages, in which you're tasked to find Wally himself and a scroll belonging to his friend Wizard Whitebeard. There's also points items and clocks, to give you extra time (as the time limit is your only foe). Wally's dog Woof is also there, taking you to a magic carpet flying, bone-collecting bonus stage (bone-us stage) when you find him. Come to think of it, you could eschew Woof and finish the game even more quickly if you don't care about points.

 

All except the final stage are fantasy-themed, and somewhat oddly, most are also battle-themed. There's a war between two factions of wizards/monks/cultists, people fighting against dragons in a cave system, an arabian nights-type stage, and a village defending themselves against giants. The final stage is a "trick" one, similar to one seen in the books, where there's many Wallies, and you have to find the real one, identified by his striped socks. There's little bits of looping animation in the stages, but nothing actually moves around, which might have made things more interesting/frustrating. I assume it would have been difficult to have that many sprites moving around the screen at once, though, and presumably everything that isn't a findable item is part of the background.

 

The Great Waldo Search isn't a game I can recommend. It's absurdly easy, it's not interesting or exciting in any way, and the best thing that can really be said about it is that at least it won't bore you for a long time. I'm curious as to how many copies it sold, I can't imagine there were many happy customers paying probably £40 for this. The closest I can find to a release date is December 1992, which adds even more absurdity: Sonic 2 had been released just the previous month!