to begin silly and light-hearted and evolve in intensity toward the game's climax; Thal applied the same strategy within each of the game's five levels from the first to third acts. Thal performed the bass, guitar, vocals and keyboard himself, while the drums were performed by Brad Kaiser. The soundtrack was recorded and mixed in February 1995. By the time of Wild Woodys release in September 1995, the Sega CD was near the end of its life cycle, and Sega Multimedia Studio had dissolved. As predicted by the development team, distribution of Wild Woody was quickly relegated to bargain bins. Reception Critical reception to Wild Woody was generally poor. A reviewer for VideoGames noted the high amount of erasable elements and described the music as "lots of wacky toe-tappers", but found the visuals to be "a little grainy". The four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly agreed that the ability to draw up necessary items is interesting, but that the controls make erasing enemies difficult and there are frequent cheap hits. The Pencil Grinder of GamePro criticized the poor controls when jumping and summarized that "Woody comes up short in every department." The game's title has been widely criticized for its sexually suggestive nature. In response, Doug Lanford agreed that the title was "tragic" and recalled that it was subject to several jokes by the development team. Wild Woody failed to make a commercial impact, which Lanford attributed to its late release in the 16-bit era, questionable character design and standard platforming gameplay. In a retrospective review for Wild Woody, a writer for Game Informer lambasted the game as "tremendously putrid" and "one of the most impotent games in the Sega CD's pathetic library". The writer particularly criticized the "awful" cutscenes and inconsistent controls which resulted in "unavoidable" damage from enemies, but acknowledged the music's high quality. Evan Hopkins of Screen Rant felt that the game's "eye-searing" cutscenes, "x-treme" attitude and obnoxious mascot character made Wild Woody "a perfect allegory for the failure of the Sega CD". He criticized the game's controls as "remarkably clunky" and lending to an unfairly steep difficulty level. References External links 1995 video games North America-exclusive video games Pencils Platform games Sega CD games Sega CD-only games Sega video games Video games based on Native American mythology Video games developed in the United States Video games about parallel universes