Hard Boiled

Every time I check out a new AAA release I can’t help, but feel that gaming culture became very different. Now a game feels the need to show me a tutorial on how to open a door about a hundred times, draw a gigantic arrow on screen to point me in the right direction, and if I’m struggling with a puzzle, the protagonist will eventually just blurt out the solution. It’s all fine and good. I’m older now, and don’t have as much time or patience for games. These changes make the overall experience less frustrating and therefore more enjoyable, BUT in most cases they kill the two things games used to heavily rely on – exploration and discovery. Many games of yesteryear have dropped you in its world without many hints on what to do and how to do it. They counted on you being adventurous and persistent. As a result many games were quite hard. Some (UFO/X-Com, I’m looking at you) were almost impossible, yet felt incredibly satisfying when conquered. This got me thinking about times when hard games delivered truly great gaming experiences. Good times. And then I remembered a certain 8-bit mascot…

Now, I have to put a little disclaimer here for my American friends. Of course, when you think of an “8-bit mascot” you, no doubt, think of a certain mustachioed Italian plumber, but that’s not really the case in other parts of the world. In many countries consoles were not as popular, and many 8-bit personal computers ruled the gaming world. Our 8-bit mascots were a knight, a mole, a miner going through lots of psychedelic dungeons, and DIZZY.

Dizzy was the protagonist of quite a few games on a variety of platforms. In fact, if you count the spin-offs featuring the character, there are over ten games in the series with MS-DOS getting only four out of the main line. Dizzy is an egg. An adventure seeking egg with boxing gloves, rain boots, and a permanent smile on his face. Yes. The games were these sort of adventure-platformers where Dizzy would go around an open world in a typical platformer fashion, while the adventure side involved a limited inventory and a variety of fetch quests and the like in order to progress. This simple, yet unusual formula made Dizzy a huge success. My friends and I sunk incredible amounts of time into these games. We loved Dizzy. However, Dizzy games are a perfect example of TERRIBLE design. A game that does EVERYTHING in its power to stop the player from succeeding.

Dizzy had a lot of character for a platformer protagonist. Because he is an egg, each of his jumps results in a somersault. I don’t know, it made sense back then. If he doesn’t land of his feet, he keeps on rolling until he does, because, well, he’s an egg (Why did I ever think it made sense?). And that’s all fine and good until he rolled headfirst into something harmful. And in a Dizzy game that usually was EVERYTHING. Every living creature was out to get Dizzy. And a lot of the scenery. So much of your time is spent watching Dizzy roll right into water, fire, enemies, spikes and whatever else you were trying to avoid. Combine it with the fact that most of the early entries in the series didn’t bother to give you a life bar, and you’ll get my frustration. Or imagine that a game like that could only have ONE life, like the second entry – Treasure Island Dizzy (not released for DOS). Yes. One mistake and you have to restart. Saving? Haha! You must be joking! And as if that wasn’t enough how about some instakill traps? And now how about hiding some, so they couldn’t be avoided unless you knew about them beforehand? We got that too! In a game with ONE life and no life bar. So much fun…

The problems didn’t stop even after the creators figured out that maybe cruelly punishing you for buying a game might not be the best idea and actually gave you a lifebar and an ability to get extra lives (and, ironically, removed death from falling, about the only thing that actually made sense about an egg.) My favorite entry in the series – console targeted Fantastic Dizzy (aka The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy) was aiming to improve the series for new players. One of those improvements was an adjustment to the series’ three item inventory. Now you had three inventory cells at the bottom of the screen. Pressing the “action” button would prompt Dizzy to drop or use the rightmost item, while a fresh pickup would make it into the cell on the left. Good idea. In theory. Now imagine hundreds of deaths just because you accidentally dropped a snorkeling mask underwater while cycling through the items. Not to mention that the whole THREE item limit in a game like that was pure torture. It literally took me years before I beat some of the Dizzy games.

But even if you’ve figured out all the puzzles, the locations of all the traps and a safe way through all mini-games, the designers STILL had one more ace up their sleeve. How about collecting a number of objects to be allowed to actually finish the game? 30 coins? 20 cherries? How about we hide some BEHIND other things? This insanity hit its limits with Fantastic Dizzy where you had to collect TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY stars spread throughout the large world of the game. Often these stars are found in dangerous areas. That included mini games as well. Try to get the stars while one wrong turn could lead to your instant demise.

These were the games that I played religiously. I remember the day I got Fantastic Dizzy, and my friend and I played it for SIX hours straight without finishing even half of the game.

Still, I must admit I love Dizzy. It could be just plain nostalgia, but I enjoy playing these games now, when I know where all the traps are, when I know how to solve all the puzzles, or if worse comes to worst, I could fiddle with an emulator a bit and cheat a little. I like seeing Dizzy’s smiling face. I like exploring the world. And it’s not just me. Dizzy is still loved by many (although I guess, not as many as I thought, hence the recent Kickstarter failure.) There’s a great online resource called yolkfolk.com, which will lead you to dozens of fangames, faithful remakes of the originals, and even an engine that allows creation of your own Dizzy adventures. Despite obtuse gameplay I’d still recommend checking the series out if you aren’t familiar with it. It’s very much a product of its time. A different time. A time when developers were trying everything. A time when it was okay to a have a smiling egg as a protagonist. A time when being overly difficult was not looked down upon. A time when, as a gamer, you had to have balls of steel and patience of an angel. A time that’s long gone.