| MERCHANDISE - GAMES |
| The Tor Books Willow Boardgame |
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Designed by Greg Costikyan, the creator
of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game and manufactured by Tor Books,
this boardgame originally retailed for about $30. Players divide into two teams:
Good (Willow, Madmartigan, Airk, and Franjean and Rool) vs Evil (General
Kael and Sorsha). The good guys try to get the Elora to Tir Asleen
while the bad guys try to steal the baby away to Nockmaar castle. Note:
the bad guys always win.
The complete game manual is available here in text format. |
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| The Willow Boardgame for Children |
| Created by Parker Bros., this was a simple boardgame intended for kids ages 6 to 12. The basic idea was to roll dice and move your player around the board, picking up cards (either Villains or Heroes) as instructed by the space you landed on. You could discard matching Villain cards in pairs, and play matching Hero cards, also in pairs. If you played three pairs of Heroes in the course of the game, and had no Villains in your hand, you won. Though it lacked the intricacy of the Tor game, it did feature some killer artwork. |
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| The NES Game |
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In this traditional
roleplaying video game (much like The Legend of Zelda), designed by Capcom
for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Willow must journey to
Nockmaar castle to defeat the evil Queen Bavmorda. This is where any similarity
to the movie stops. From the game's opening sequence, great liberties
are taken with the Willow storyline: Bavmorda, messenger of the Spirit
of the Sky, has banished Fin Raziel, messenger of the Spirit of the
Earth, and is attempting conquer the world. Only Willow can stop her! Madmartigan,
Sorsha, Fin Raziel, and Franjean and Rool make brief appearances along
the way, but only to offer advice to our hero. Dozens of new characters
and scenarios were added to make the game more interesting. Check out the
FAQ for more info. (Note: I've been told that section
4.12, The Way to Tir Asleen, is inaccurate.)
If you have the game, check out these maps and cheat codes. Now you can play the Willow NES game on your PC! Click here to download the file. Note: It is illegal to download and/or use any games that you do not own the cartridge for. I take no responsibility for illegal downloads. You will also need an emulator such as NESTicle to play the game. Every time I provide a link to a site where you can get this, the site moves away. So your best bet is to run a search on "nes emulator" and choose from the results that come up. |
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(US Release) |
(Japanese Release) |
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| The Computer Game |
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According to the game's creator, Peter Oakley:
"It was a cutting-edge game at the time it was released. We used state-of-the-art compression techniques to squeeze loads of 16-color (EGA) graphics onto the disk. EGA was a new arrival on the computer display scene at the time. This was the first Mindscape game to be optimized for EGA. Before that, game graphics had been 'dumbed-down' to 4-color CGA graphics. "The menu for the game was a foreshadowing of the World Wide Web -- a scrolling window of text and graphics introduced the storyline, and certain words were HYPERTEXT; clicking on them dropped you into game mode. "Game play was actually a collection of several 'mini' games. Two different mazes, a forest chase, three spellcastings, the fork in the road, the swordfight with General Kael, and the final battle spellcasting. "The game was released in stores the same week the movie came out, so we caught the wave and sales were brisk. I spent several days in the warehouse, shrinkwrapping thousands of copies of the game to be shipped out to retailers. Willow was the 4th best selling game for Mindscape in 1988, outsold only by Gauntlet, Paperboy, and Outrun." You can check out Mindscape's game manual here. Now you can play the Willow PC game for yourself! Download the zip file here. |
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| The Arcade Game |
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A little known curiosity,
the CAPCOM video game company (the same company who makes such arcade hits
as the Street Fighter series, and who made the original NES Willow game)
came out with this fantastic arcade game in 1988. Unlike the NES game,
however, this game actually followed the storyline of the film, and gave
you a chance to play as Madmartigan in a few levels! The graphics were
extraordinary for that time (much like the Super Star Wars SNES games that
would come a few years down the road). In the game, you start in the woods
outside the Nelwyn village, and proceed through the plot of the film to the
final battle against Bavmorda. As with all video games, a few liberties
are taken with the plot (Willow's main weapon is throwing fireballs; a
boss monster Willow fights is a giant mutated Death Dog, and a
flamedragon-throwing magician in another level), but overall, it's MUCH closer than
the NES version. To see a page filled with over 50 screen shots from the
game, click here.
Thanks to the wonderful CALLUS Arcade Emulator, you may now play the WILLOW arcade game on your PC! Download the ROM files, and the Emulator needed to play it with, at the Callus homepage, here. |
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