Wild Woody Review (Sega CD, 1995)

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. Wild Woody is a hilarious name for a video game. It’s so absurd and childish that I’m surprised it even got past the drawing board in the 90s. Before letting your imagination go wild I’ll say that the game is about a magical pencil, and Wild Woody is his name. This one was released in the height of companies trying to come up with the next cool mascot. Surprisingly this one was made by Sega themselves. You’d think they would be able to come up with something better than a grinning pencil, but here we are. Today I decided to give Wild Woody a go. Should you? Let’s take a look.

The game opens up to a surprisingly long full motion video to introduce this crazy story. A totem pole explodes on the desk of some kind of researcher, and the various fragments scatter into nearby paintings. Only the bottom totem remains, and he searches for the closest nearby object to bring to life in order to retrieve them. He settles on a pencil. Wild Woody springs to life, introduces himself, and quickly sets out to save the world. For such a weird and obviously niche game there’s a lot of full motion video and voice acting here. Particularly in between each stage. It’s impressive for a game released on the Sega CD. Unfortunately the rest of this package isn’t.

You really have to wonder why Sega thought an anthropomorphic pencil would make a good character. The game is a 2D platformer wherein you play as the wild guy and your goal is simply to make it to the end of five different stages. Awaiting you is a boss in each. It’s a pretty standard set up for a platformer, but there’s lots to collect. Every level has within it sketches, puzzle pieces, colored pencils, and more. To be honest even after finishing the game I couldn’t really tell what most of these do. Their effects are super insignificant. A few times I unlocked bonus games, but I’m really not sure how. I’m sure it’s tied to the items you collect. I wish Wild Woody outlined more what everything does because even at the end of the adventure I had little idea.

Wild Woody does have a few special abilities at his disposal. The pencil with attitude can walk, run, jump, and climb vines/ropes by default. Your main method of attacking foes is by erasing them. Our protagonist is a pencil, after all. To do so you have to jump on them and then hold down the B button to activate this ability. Wild Woody can also draw things. This helps to fight enemies and create objects to aid in progression, but it’s limited. You have to first collect the sketches to use them, and each time Wild Woody draws something he shrinks. You can restore him to like-new condition by collecting the scattered colored pencils. Hey, at least Sega came up with SOME ideas to tie in the pencil theme, right? I’m not saying these mechanics are brilliant, but the ideas are fleshed out.

Unfortunately gameplay has some major issues right out of the gate. Our guy Wild Woody has some serious control issues. For one thing his movement is really clunky. It feels like there’s a delay in pressing the direction you want him to move and him actually stepping that way. Furthermore jumps didn’t always register. In a platformer that can be the kiss of death, and it causes major problems here. Furthermore the game often registered a high jump (holding down the C button longer) as a simple tap of the button. To make matters worse the collision detection is awful. Jumps I was sure I cleared led to damage, and the game often didn’t register me being in the right place to erase foes. This led to even more precious percentage points of life lost. Thankfully Wild Woody is pretty easy overall.

Your health here is measured as a percentage at the top of the screen. Problem is the damage you take seems totally random. I could almost swear I was hit by the same enemy multiple times and each instance dinged me a different amount. Maybe it’s just my imagination. You can refill Wild Woody’s life by collecting hearts in each stage. Even on normal difficulty the distribution of these is very liberal. It felt like there wasn’t much danger to be honest. The anthropomorphic pencil can take a ton of hits, and there are hearts aplenty. I will say that this alleviates some of the issues with the collision detection and controls. I can’t imagine how frustrating this one is playing on the harder difficulty though.

The level designs, like the basic premise, are weird. It uses the same multi-tier approach that classic Sonic titles did. Here it makes little sense though. I found myself getting lost in just about every level. Thankfully you can use the classic approach if simply moving right at every opportunity, and this worked in every stage. Taking different paths is largely incidental to the rest of the game. Sure, you’ll get more collectibles if you explore them, but these feel insignificant overall. I certainly never felt the urge to prolong my experience with this game. On the plus side the boss encounters are actually surprisingly fun. These guys are huge and often take up more than the entire screen. It’s also the only part of Wild Woody that feels like a real challenge, besides fighting the controls of course.

Wild Woody doesn’t even have much content. You’d think a game released on CD would have more than five levels with two stages apiece, but alas, that’s not the case. It seems that the developers blew the budget on the full motion video. As far as I’m concerned the game would be better without it. My first time through it took me less than two hours from start to credits. Considering how expensive the CD-add on was it just seems crazy. What’s more is that there’s zero replayability here. That’s from two different things though. The game doesn’t have enough secrets, nor does it contain meaningfully designed branching paths. It’s also super frustrating to play. It’s not likely that you’re going to want to come back to this one. Wild Woody feels like one of those bargain bid third party games. I expect more from Sega.

The game also isn’t much of a looker. The sprite work and use of color make it look like something that could have been released on the PC-Engine. That’s pretty bad for a Sega CD title that released in 1995. In motion Wild Woody fares a little better. The main character animates pretty well, and I have to say that some of his motions are funny. In particular, the way he dances while idle had me grinning. The boss characters also look great and while they barely animate the sprite work is pretty good. The full motion videos are grainy, but remain some of the most impressive on the platform. Unfortunately the soundtrack is a major bummer. It doesn’t sound very good. It’s redbook audio, but most of the tracks sound like something the Genesis itself could have reproduced. The voice acting is ridiculous, and not in a good way.