Magician Lord

Magician Lord is one of the earlier games released on the Neo Geo. It’s a action platform game where you control a wizard that can turn into different things by obtaining orb like objects. *Keranu Fun Fact: Magician Lord was the first Neo Geo game I have ever played!* This is one badass game to the max.

I’m not entirely sure what the story is about, but it’s something to do with this wizard on an adventure collecting books while being menaced by this man in dark clothing, perhaps it’s Satan. Anyways this wizard has the power of magic and can turn into different things like I mentioned above. I guess his goal is to collect all the books and destroy the evil dude. Typical story.

Magician Lord has two buttons; attack and jump. You go around different action stages killing sweet looking monsters and solving some mazes. Toward the end of each stage there is a sub boss and once it’s defeated there is an intro with that evil dude that says something and casts you to fight a big boss. There are some awesome bosses in this game like the first level boss which has this eye thing that pokes out of the wall and shoots crap at you. Not only are there awesome bosses, but some cool levels too. One badass level that comes to mind is this where you are inside some body and the doors are made out of muscle tissue and stuff and the floors are made out of wiggling blood vessels, it’s truly excellent. Levels that take place inside a body always rule.

Like I’ve mentioned, you can turn into different things like a dragon, ninja, and lizard. It’s similar to Altered Beasts except that you can’t beef up your muscles. You can, however, beef up your attack power a couple times which can be almost as cool as beefing up your muscles - NOT. All-in-all, nice Altered Beast elements in this game.

Since this was the first Neo Geo game I have ever played, the graphics totally blew me away when I first played it. The mode-7 like scalling was really nice and impressive. Even though I experienced more Neo games after this and found there are some games with graphics much nicer than this even, I still think the graphics are very good. There are some really awesome monster designs in this game.

Music is okay. Really nothing that has made its way into my head before, but it fits the game. Most of the tracks tend to have a heavier sound to them and some sound pretty cool. The sound effects are not as good as they could’ve been, but still alright. The explosion sound effects are nice and even the door opening effects. It would’ve been a lot cooler if the monsters were wailing and screaming and stuff. Oh well, I guess not all games have sound effects like Metal Slug.

This game is very fun and should definitely be played at least once. It’s a classic to me and maybe even one of my top ten favorite Neo Geo games. If you see it at the arcade, why not throw in a quarter or two and give a go at it? It’s really got some badass charm to it.

-Keranu, March 4th, 2005 11:22pm USA Central Time