Zwackery is an arcade game with “complicated” controls from the mind of Brian Colin, an artist, animator and designer on other arcade titles like Rampage, Xenophobe and Arch Rivals. His games have an art direction that is very distinct; just looking at any of the promotional material for the games themselves or graphics make it very clear when you are looking at a Brian Colin game. I met Brian in 2019 at the Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee and he is the nicest guy in the world. I love the way he looks at the world and translates that to games.
In this arcade game, you play the part of Zackary Thwacker, a red-robed wizard with a big nose, a long white beard and a sword and shield. The game itself refers to him as “Zack.” This is the best picture I can find of the control panel. You can’t really tell that Zwackery uses a push/pull spinner in the photo, except that the control panel overlay does say that you can push and pull it. Together with a flight stick (that offers two buttons) you have everything you need to try to turn your “beloved” (wife? girlfriend? Look at the age of this guy, it had better be his wife by now) back into a human woman, after some dickcheese turned her into a frog.
The antagonist in question (“Ghoulum”) turns her into a frog IMMEDIATELY. While I have seen a Zwackery arcade cabinet once in my life, I had to play the game in MAME for this article and there is literally almost not enough time to put in a credit, hit “1” to start, move Zackary to the edge of the tutorial screen so that play can begin, and then take a screenshot. Much like how the screen was divided up into three horizontal areas later for Xenophobe, the first board for Zwackery has you on the middle “level” of the board. With keys, you can ascend or descend by going left or right from this initial starting spot.
The chaos here is relentless. There are dive bombing birds, falling apple cores, keys – which are necessary – falling from the sky that knock you down should they hit you. Ghoulum seems to be a pretty regular participant in dealing damage as well, it’s not enough that he started all of this by transmogrifying your wife, he then interferes while you are trying to set things right. I do not care for him.
Like many of my fellow Generation X games, I spent the years from 2005 to 2010 trying to make the ultimate MAME control panel for my Windows computer. I bought everything I thought I needed: a RAM Controls roller (The RAM Controls guy, a criminal, actually mailed it to me! I was part of the “seeding” for the scams, I guess), LED pushbuttons, a Sanwa joystick, an Ultimarc keyboard encoded. The works. I got it in my head that I needed a spinner and settled upon the “Blackhawk” push / pull spinner from Apache Controls. This is a great review of it, with photos. I thought I needed this spinner because I would want to accurately play Discs of Tron on my MAME control panel. The Blackhawk spinner has a built-in USB connector that I am happy to report works correctly with Windows 10 – the pushing and pulling of the spinner top activates two arcade microswitches that map to left click and right click for a mouse. The spinner itself, of course, moves the mouse pointer left and right by default. Zwackery using a flight stick is almost a choice you have to make when you decide that the push / pull spinner is going to be in the game, because you don’t have your left hand free to press buttons. Thus the trigger and and thumb button on the flight stick.
I do not have the frankenmonstrosity any longer, but they only made 300 Zwackery cabinets, so it may be up to me to have one last attempt at woodworking, to see if I can construct something to properly play this game with.
Ok, so – what do you do with all of these controls in Zwackery? You have a sword and shield. You can wield one at a time, and use the spinner to rotate them about you. You attack and damage enemies by just running the sword into them, but you can rotate the shield, too. You can lift the spinner to cast spells. There are items scattered around the game’s levels that can be used to cast spells. I have had many conversations about the specific layouts of Defender, Discs of Tron and Asteroids and I do feel that both games benefit by having a control system that are unique and not just waving a single joystick around with buttons. Since casting a spell takes you to a “menu” screen, a different way to enter that menu could have been designer, but I think I like that pulling up on the spinner gets you there.
Brief aside that relates to how the game looks: I was driving home two nights ago. It was dusk and some large commercial trucks were going slowly in the right lane up I-70 West. It was raining and there was just enough scattered, crimson lights on these trucks where I thought the word “LIFT” was being presented by one of them in top-down order. So the L above the I and so forth. I got closer and it was just a weird artifact: the truck had four red, vertical lights on the cab. I don’t know what they were for, they did not seem to indicate turning. But it struck me how unseemly it is to have writing just appear in the night on a highway. I mention it, because the speech for Zwackery takes place in bubbles like the screenshot to the left. Having words silently appear like this in an arcade game made in the mid 80s is unsettling, especially when your wife has been turned into a frog and she’s just saying KILL. Like, literally KILL and then a heart. She’s trying to offer advice on where to strike Ghoulum, but I guess I could understand why boomers thought games were bad for their kids sometimes. If your wife got turned into a giant frog and is saying KILL, that’s horrifying.
I do enjoy that she is a frog, though, it’s a fun design decision. She accompanies you from level to level, and there are water areas in the game that kill Zack if he falls into the water. But she is a frog, so she survives. There is a spot early on where Zack needs to get on a flying carpet to go up a level. But she can jump really high, so she can follow. Maybe it is better that she has been turned into a toad person. Is she leading us to the cure, or to a place where Zack can be a frog-like being as well? (Well, it’s the former.)
But yeah, we have a wizard running around with a sword and shield casting spells against waves of enemies. The Bard’s Tale was also a 1985 release and to do all of those things you’d want to roll six characters for such an adventure. You have to give it to Zackery Thwacker, he doesn’t have five other people helping him mop up berserkers. He’s capable of all of those things in what is essentially an arcade role-playing game.
I’d like to say that I have seen everything that Zwackery has to offer, but of course I haven’t. There is a feeling involving exploration that I’d like to try to describe. The first time I saw the “ship” level of Popeye, it blew my mind. How many levels were there? Well, just three and that one was the last one. I bought one of Brian Colin’s later games, Xenophobe, in arcade cabinet form because it seemed to have one handcrafted level after another. This feeling of exploration is something I have been chasing in games forever. I think Zwackery personifies it. Additionally, these beautiful, awkward controls! They are awkward, but just in writing this article they were starting to grow on me. Video games have always been around me and the innovation in arcade games, specifically as it pertains to control schemes, made for unique games and experiences. It’s something we have gotten away from.
MAME is still this whole, exhausting thing to just try to play a game. No hate, but they don’t make it easy. Here is how to play it.
I used version 274b of MAME.
Grab MAME32 here.
Grab the zwackery.zip ROM file here.
I needed “midcsd” from here, which I assume is some general Midway files.
- Zwackery was played on MAME 274b using a keyboard, and an Apache Blackhawk Push/Pull Spinner.