Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 441: Dizzy

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

The time for yolking is over. Or, more accurately, has just begun. Stuart Gipp and Dave Bulmer reconvene to discuss the immortal Dizzy series. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, what's big and small at the same time? A big egg. Hello, welcome once again to retronauts, or as I have taken to calling it, Brittronauts. Yeah, you've made it British. It's the video gaming podcast that covers mostly old games and sometimes new games with an old lean and sometimes old hardware and sometimes means of preserving hardware. And if it's to do with retro gaming, you're going to find it.

on here. And it's in that spirit that I stewardip, your host, hello, it's me again. I have brought you what can only be described by those who know me as an inevitable episode about Dizzy, the egg. We are covering Dizzy. Now, this is the sort of, if you read my journalism on the Wetramaut's website, you'll know that my Dizzy obsession is bordering on the psychotics. So, yeah, this was going to happen. We had a slight schedule. kerfuffle and I took the initiative to lead in and say, how about dizzy right now?

And no, it was already on the schedule, but I just moved it forward. And as you can hear, cackling at my hilarity in the background. You're so cool. Thank you. Yes, I know. I do have rather a dry wit. It's Dave Bulma, he's returned. You know what it is?

You know what it is? It's that famous British humour. Isn't it? It's the famous British humour. humor. I'm going to do some as well. The new retrodorts will have six episodes and nothing further. Yes. Mm, a mere six. Hello, Dave. How are you today? How are you? Hello there. I'm Dave Bulmer, and I'm feeling a bit sleepy and weird because I didn't sleep very well last night, but I intend not to let that affect my recording, and I don't think it will, because

my natural rhythms mean that I'm absolutely wide awake at just the sort of time I should be going to bed. I'm recording this, not, not Ben, but in the evening, so I think I'll be all right. You couldn't sleep because you were so excited about doing a Dizzy podcast. That genuinely might be the case. Like, I flippin' love Dizzy, and I'm absolutely sick. Stuart, I'm sick to the back teeth of all these Americans going around as if Dizzy isn't very good and doesn't matter. And we're going to set them right. We are.

We're going to foot the world to race today. You don't need. It doesn't take much to egg us on. Hey! Hey! So let's do a bit of pot of history. I'm going to be completely honest with you. folks, the origins of Dizzy

have been written about extensively in almost every retro covered publication, so I don't want to go into excess detail repeating things that I'm fairly sure you probably know already. Somebody drew an egg. That's it. That's the origin of it. Someone drew an egg on a piece of paper and went

that's a game. Yeah. But no, I don't think it was on a piece of paper, but yeah. Dizzy was created in 1987, the year of my birth and the year of Dizzy's birth, what can I say? In a few more years of balding, I will resemble Dizzy exactly. Well, that's the thing.

We're now at the point where nearly everyone who play, the majority of people who were interested in Dizzy in a big way now resemble an egg. Yeah, they've become, they are become Dizzy. Yeah, the Oliver Twins went first, and the rest of us just followed their leave. Yes, the Oliver twins, the creators of Dizzy, Philip and Andrew Oliver, a couple of sound fellows.

Yeah, lovely dudes, apparently. Really nice. I have met them, and I will tell them about, I will talk about that later because it's an all right story. I mean, it's not going to change. As long as set the world on fire, it's not as good as your Zool, pornography, geography, geography, teacher story.

No, sure. It's all right. Anyway, yes, but the character came about before any of the games because the Oliver Twins and their infinite twin-wisdom noted that they noticed that most video game characters at the time, you know, the microcomputers, the 8-bit, Becky, Commodore 64, They couldn't really display any sort of emotion, any sort of character, because they were basically just some dots.

You know, they added very small heads if they were any kind of detail. So their new character is essentially just a massive face that wears gloves and boots. And that's Dizzy. He is an egg. He is egg. Dizzy the egg. Egg. And he's called Dizzy because when he jumps, he sort of spins and tumbles and rolls,

which is amazing, probably infuriates gamers because it's so, because it's kind of unpredictable, but it's actually good and you're wrong. They're wrong. And it was thanks to a development tool that they developed

a name as panda sprites that let them rotate the graphics very easily because that was not really seen that often on the specky back in the day either. But the gameplay in Dizzy, while it is sort of platform adjacent, platform gaming adjacent,

there is some, quite a bit of skill-based, you know, Twitchy as they would call it now platforming. It's mostly about solving puzzles because as in a sort of pointing click adventure game, you need to pick up items and combine them with other

items or locations or give them to characters in exchange for advice or other items, usually other items. But the quirk comes in and depending on which game you're playing, you'll only be able to carry a certain number of items. It's usually three

but there have been some where it's just the one. I think maybe that might just be the first one, actually. That's the first one. Because we'll get to it, but they sort of evolved the system as it went along, and then I think they eventually settled on the one that they use in Fantasy World Dizzy, where you manually select your items rather than cycling through them. But more important than that, now that we've talked about what basically happens in Dizzy, which is that, I think we need to know, David, what's your history with Dizzy?

How did you encounter Dizzy and what does Dizzy do? you. What did he do to you? Yeah, yeah, I can tell you very precisely what... I would like to know. This is going to be good. Well, gearing up to tell you the story. I was in the W.H. Smith's in Ashby. Oh, yes. That place just keeps coming up on Retronauts. I don't know why.

Does it? No. Right. And I was there, and I was eight, and we were just poking about... I think I was looking at the Maid Marian books. And at that end of the shop, there was... there was this display. There was this thing, proud of, pride of place,

above the end of an aisle, was this big illustration of Dizzy. And this was the first time I'd ever seen him. I now recognize it was probably the Magicland Dizzy cover, and it was probably advertising the Dizzy collection, which had just come out because now there were enough games to bring out a box set of them, so like about five. And I just remember looking at that and going like,

huh, it looks like my sort of thing. Look at him. He's a cartoon guy. Got big eyes. That's kind of all I need to know, right? Whatever. Okay, whatever. Move on. And then, but I didn't know what it was. But it seemed to be advertising it as something I ought to know. Like, oh, it's the famous Dizzy.

Oh, is it? And then, moments later, and you'll be able, listeners will be able to pinpoint exactly when this was by this information. Not long later at all. Out came an issue of, I think, Crash magazine, which, in those days, games magazines used to come with tapes, sell a tape to the front that had game demos on and sometimes full games. And in this particular case, it had a mixture of the two

because it was something called Dizzy 3.5 into Magic Land. Yes. And this was a self-contained little tiny mini adventure that wasn't pulled out of any of the other games. It was made, especially for this, in which you, essentially it's like the perfect tutorial for Dizzy. It shows you get Dizzy. And you, you know, have to put a couple of items with other items.

You talk to a character and you ultimately make a machine go using an interestingly intricate little puzzle that then sends you off to Magic Land ready for the next game, which was Magic Land Dizzy, which presumably had just come out. And that was why this... So would you say that Road to Magic Land or into Magic Land was, is sort of the Marvel Cinematic Universe post-credit sequence to Fantasy World Dizzy? Yes. Yes. Sort of. Except it wasn't at the end of Fantasy World Diddy, which would make it precisely that. But yeah. And it was, I mean, I suppose really, it was more of a teaser trailer than anything else. But it was just so amazing to me. Because, and this is where we get a little bit of context for the people who are either too young or too American to have been there. These are the things that you need to know. We didn't have a video game crash here. We have. had computers. That was what we played most of our games on anyway. Not even bothered about Atari's and things. We just, we had computers. We had cheap computers like the ZX Spectrum, which was for a computer incredibly cheap. It was like two or three hundred quid. And it had just lost, that's right, lost the battle to be included in all schools. They were going to put,

there was going to be a computer in every primary school and the BBC Micro won that and not the spectrum. So it was a sort of underdog. and it was cheaper, and it didn't come across as all posh and to do with school, and it had some quite rude games on it. So it did phenomenally well, and everybody had one. And all of the games on that thing were a little bit homemade-looking. And the graphics, even though there were arcade games, this was, you know, the 80s, you know, the early and then mid-80s.

And so graphics were very kind of abstract. And this is, you know, exactly as Stuart's just been saying, this was the problem that they found that a lot of characters, that you played at as in games were just like clusters and you used a lot of imagination to figure out what they were supposed to look like. Dizzy though,

it looked like exactly what it was supposed to be. It was a little cartoon smiley face who moved in a new way. He moved in a way that looked like a little guy, like a little cartoon guy. And he was standing in a little cartoon world that didn't have that representative tiles look

that all the other games had. You know, the famous ones are like Jetset Willie and Manic Minor and that, in which, you know, and Chucky Egg, the perhaps first egg-based spectrum game to really hit it big. It's Chucky Egg, man. Sorry, I'm getting on a tangent, but that game still controls like a dream to me. What a flawlessly slick game that is. Who needs? You know what came out today? Horizon Forbidden West.

I want Chucky Egg, Forbidden West. That's what I want. Oh, yeah. Imagine that. Not Chuck E, too, though. zooming in on his face and seeing all the little paws and all the little hairs

as a, you know, he picks up an egg and he goes, blah, but in surround sound. But the real horror of seeing that big bird in that cage

and not knowing when it's going to come out, you know? I know. Not knowing. What if it does come out? What if it comes out? What's going to happen

with this? Yeah. But minor Willie and Henhouse Harry were chunks of pixels. I think Henhouse Harry might have had the suggestion of a face.

It was like a dot for an eye, maybe a line for a mouth, I actually have a relevant anecdote about this, genuinely. Well, I went to a sort of a seminar day thing in Cambridge that was all game developers. And they hosted the developers of Ghost Hunter, Sony Cambridge, did a little show thing, and they offered, they were doing quizzes throughout it

and giving away copies of Ghost Hunter. And one of the first quiz they did is put a picture up on the screen of Minor Willie. And they said, could anyone name this character? And I was like, it's Minor Willie. it's minor willie of course it's minor willie and they were like congratulations it was minor willie here is your copy of ghost hunter like great thank you free game and i realized later it was actually henhouse harry oh i so i had acquired ghost hunter through false pretences but i'd also expose them as not really knowing what they were talking about that's shocking yeah so you can see but you can see why people confused i mean they're quite similar looking to be fair they're similar looking it's just what what shake their hat is really isn't exactly Oh, no, no. Wait, no, Henhouse Harry is a lot rounder.

He is a bit more eggy-shaped. He is. He is, yes. But the fact is, I've got a copy of Ghost Hunter, which I have acquired through essentially crime. Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't have done that. That's, in fact, I think you should go and give it back. I think I sold it. I think I traded it in for three pounds.

Oh, God, that's a lot of crime. All stacked up on top of each other. What you should have done is not traded it in, nor giving it back, but you should have gone there as if to give it back, and then just smack them about the head with it for getting the question wrong, and then you would have been even then. Yeah, it's just stop getting 8-bit microcomputers wrong. Yeah. I told you it was a relevant anecdote.

I'm pleased I got to draw that very specific related anecdote out. That was the same one where I visibly upset David Brabham, but that's a story for another time. Yeah. He's the greatest. He's fantastic. Wherever there is danger, you'll be there. He's the ace. He's amazing.

He's the strongest. He's the quickest. He's the best. Angel Mouse. Anyway, yes. Dizzy. Sorry. So Dizzy, yeah.

The whole point of Dizzy, right, was to make something that gave kids that reaction that I had. Their concept was. By the way, this was made by two children. I don't know. To what extent they were still like little children. They might have been like 17 or something. but they were kids. And they, and when you see footage of them from, like, the first days when,

because this wasn't their first game by a long shot, and they were already successful. And when they started, they were little boys who have sweet little round faces. That's the story of so many British, um, microcomputer developers is that they were home. They were children, learned to code on the spectrum and started making games and sending them to software houses. And until they went, yeah, sure. That's, that's the story of, uh, so many of the story of, uh,

So many, it's a story of Alfred Chicken. It's the story of one minor willy, it's just the beautiful story. While in America, they were shoveling copies of E.T. into a landfill and thinking, I wish Mario would come out. Mario, yeah. Why, why please can Mario come out now? I don't like this anymore.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is the classic story of British gaming. And I think that, like, the Oliver Twins are basically, the best example of it they're the clearest example of it because they really were kids, they really did learn to code at school, and in their real bedroom they really did code some games

and they really sent them in to two other boys who ran a company called Codemasters. They were we at the same time, and they just printed their games, and they were really successful. But the point of

dizzy was twofold. One, let's get something that looks like, you know, that looks good, that looks the way cartoons look as close as we can on the hardware. And two, we're boys, we watch cartoons. These kids were watching cartoons between, like, while they were coding games, and you can tell. Because the first Dizzy game has, like, clear references

to at least two episodes of Danger Mouse, which I haven't looked up the air dates, but I'm pretty sure you'd find that if you found out the air dates for these two episodes, that's when Dizzy was made. I bet it was made the same week. Yeah, they would coincide with the development of Dizzy. I love that. Guaranteed. Definitely.

When we talk about the first Dizzy game, specifically, I'll tell you what I was, those references. But yes, they made this game about this little tumbling egg who they'd, like you said, developed, you know, just essentially during the making of another game as something to look at, I think, rather than, you know, just to see if there was something personable they could do. And, yeah, they wanted to make a full game of it.

They wanted to make it look like cartoon and fairy tales, and they did and they succeed. If you look at it now, if you go now and look at the original Dizzy game, which is on things like Amstrad and ZX Spectrum, I don't think you would get the impression of what I'm saying here about it looking that good, but it did to us. Well, it's, I mean, even, I would say even compared to its later ones, there's something quite striking about the original,

because it has a very dark look to it. It has a very, I don't know how, it's a very stark compared to the others. The others are very busy, but that's a very nighttime game. You know, it's got a real sense of magic about it, which I really do like. I think it's a bit of a turn off. Yeah, the first dizzy is the one that looks the roughest and the scrappiest in many ways, which we'll talk about as we go through the games. But I think it's the only one to explicitly have the moon be out during.

So yes, even though they've all got a black background, because they're, or at least on the spectrum they did, because that was how a spectrum worked. Yes. And it's not, they weren't coded on the spectrum, but they're, I think, thought of as spectrum games generally in those early games. Yeah, I mean, I would say that, I mean, that's, that's how I encountered them. So that's kind of how I think of them.

I mean, I've still got out right now. I'm looking right at my Disney tape because they are out. They have to be out. Mine are not out, but they are available. I could go and get them, but I'm not going. I wrote the Disney X X and Adventures little box set that I bought. On eBay, plus stacked on top of it, I have the remaining dizzy tapes. I have become a dizzy man, you see.

Though I couldn't get Crystal Kingdom dizzy because it costs infinite pounds, unfortunately. Does it? Right. Well, I'll tell you later about that and about why it doesn't matter that you haven't been able to get it. Yeah, okay. Oh, man. Yeah, I think I have played that one on Emulation, and it feels wrong. They made it really wrong, but we'll get to it.

We'll get to it. It's wrong, yeah. In fact, what we could do is, I would explain. explain how I came to find Dizzy, but the story isn't really that interesting because... Oh, wait, sorry. I forgot the last component. Oh, yes. You need to be the finale. How did I actually get Dizzy?

It was because I loved Dizzy 3 and a half so much that it was my ninth birthday present, was the Dizzy, the original Dizzy Collection, the Red Box Spectre Collection of the first few games. There we go. That's my story. Do you remember which games were in that Red Box? Yes, of course. There was Dizzy.

There was Treasure Island Dizzy. There was Fast Food. and Magic Land and something else. What was the other one? No fantasy world. Fantasy World. Of course, it was Fantasy World. What am I even talking about?

How could they... I was thinking that there must have... There can't have been any more mainline Dizzy Games. That's too much quality in one box. But no, there was. Yeah, it was most of the main Dizzy Games. If someone tried to sell me a Dizzy Box that it didn't have Fantasy World Dizzy, I would spin it in their face.

He should. Yeah, and I would kick them in the Nards. Anyway, I'm going to tell you my exciting story is how I came to discover Dizzy. It's not very good. A friend of mine had fantastic Dizzy on the N-E-S. Oh. The N-NES. Yeah, it is. It's a really funny way in,

because my impression of that game is this is the most sprawling, impossible game I've ever seen. There is no way a human being could possibly finish this game. Yeah. You've three lives. You have to collect over 200 stars. You have to get all of them. And also, there are 200. items sprawled all over this huge open

map, which I later learn is kind of essentially multiple dizzy games stapled together crudely, more or less. Sort of, yeah. More or less. With some of the small dizzy games thrown in as mini-games, like Bubble Dizzy as part of fantasy etc. Again, sort of.

Yeah. When we come to it, yeah. We'll tell you. We'll get to that. But then from there, I eventually discovered that some friends of the family had the Spectrum games, so I got to try those. And then it was just a matter of the usual DOS I had DOS versions I didn't, after I got my PC, I didn't really use

the spectrum as much. And I didn't actually have Spectrum Dizzy until I was a fully grown adult man. Just PC Dizzy, which is honestly not the same. It doesn't have the same vibe. No, no. On the plus side, I did discover my favorite Dizzy game that way, and we will get to Lexus going to

remain a secret. It's going to be a controversial choice, isn't it? And probably a bit controversial, but still not that controversial. I mean, it's not going to be Crystal Kingdoms. Is it with a world giddy? I was going to say that. Hey!

Seymour goes to Hollywood. Yeah. No, I was actually going to say with a world giddy. This is great. We're like peanut butter and marmite. We're like egg and chips. Yes, perfect.

Is that thing to people are eggs? Yeah, they do. Yeah, hand-making chips is a pub classic. That's right, yeah. Well, yeah, but just egg and chips, I feel we'll be lacking. Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose it would be a more acceptable vegetarian sort of dish. I know what goes at eggs.

Baker. Cheryl Baker. Let's talk about the Dizzy Games. Beginning with, of course, 1987's O.G. Dizzy game entitled Dizzy, the ultimate cartoon adventure. No half measures. No, no, no. That's a bit of an Infinity welcomes careful drivers

in the sense that it's sort of the tagline, sort of the name of the game, but it's mostly just a bit of advertising copy. they plopped on there so that anybody would know what they were about to get. Yeah, you'd be, you'd have a game in your hand. You'd be like, I wonder what game I should buy? And then you'd see that and you'd be like, what am I buying this nonsense for? When I could buy the ultimate cartoon adventure, I wouldn't even need any more after that, you know?

That's the thing, yeah, because it's on the shelf next to the games that say, like, an all-right cartoon adventure. It was just like a nondescript cartoon adventure. Yeah. Additional cartoon adventure. Yeah. So the original Disney game, as we've sort of discussed already. it's not proto-dizzy it's, I think it's very fully formed

but I think you should talk about it because haven't you streamed this relatively recently? I'm sure I caught you streaming it recently. I might be like this. Not what feels to me like recently. I think it was, I mean Given the COVID, it may have been over two years ago. Yeah, yeah. I think we're talking about

two years ago. It still feels like recently to me. Exactly, yeah. But within our age range, recently, yes. All the Dizzy games, as we've already explained involve walking about in a map. Don't think overhead it is a straight on 2D game

Mario, that sort of viewpoint. They're Metroidvanias boom. No, they're not. And you are and you're, but it would be a good Metroidvania. Dizzy would make a very good Metroidvania

and that I think is how they ought to revive it. It's a crime that they haven't. So you're walking about and jumping about, somersaulting over things, and if you land on a slope when you do the somersault, you're going to roll down and where you land is based on the, I hesitate to say the physics, but kind of the physics of it. It's possible, once you've played it for a while, you start to go like, oh, I'm going to roll all the way to over there. I can just tell. It's not like Sonic, where you can feel intuitively what's happening, but it's like an early step along that road.

It's like actually rolling an egg. It's like what would actually happen. It's a bit like rolling an egg, really, yeah. But you pick up items and you put them down where you want to use them. Now, in the original Disney, you can only hold one item. And because it's an old spectrum game, the spectrum hasn't really got out of its original phase, which was, and I'm not sure why this was, but it was fairly universal across all of, like, my oldest games, which is pick-uppable objects.

In the same way that when you watch, like, an 80s cartoon, you can tell what objects. are going to animate because they're drawn with ink outlines rather than painted piece of background. You know how you can tell which tile is going to turn into a trapdoor in the castle floor or whatever? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Like that, pick-upable objects on the spectrum

are delineated from everything else by cycling through all the colours of the rainbow. For some reason, this is just a trick that somebody came up with early on, I think. And so... So, yeah, so I'm pretty sure the minor willy games do that, don't they? That sort of games.

did that, and Dizzy does that. And if that's not correct, and I'm simply misremembering, then, oh, well, because I didn't play the original Dizzy very much, but I think that's how I, that's how I remember it as well. Yeah. And you, you, the little egg, who is just a face with little hands and feet, and he wiggles, when he stands still, he wiggles up and down by one, he bounces up and down one pixel, and his hands kind of flap up and down to match.

And it's, it sounds stupid, but it's really endearing. It keeps him animated. It keeps him like a little person. Yeah. Well, he's full of piss and vinegar, isn't he? Yeah, he's like, let's go, let's do this, guys. Come on. Yeah, so you pick up the things. The first puzzle in the game, basically, is that there's a corridor you can't get down

because there's a sort of a mine cart in the way. This tunnel leads down towards the entrance to this mine. There's a mine cart in the way. And if you pick up the sticky grease gun, no, it can't be sticky if it's a grease gun. It'd be the opposite. Well, if somethingy, yeah, it could be, a slippy grease gun. I feel like it's a sticky. Well, anyway, you pick up the grease gun.

The sticky grease gun could have become sticky and unrelated incident. Like, you could have fall into something sticky. That's not, you know. Yeah, okay, yeah. But I bet it's a slippy grease gun. Anyway, you pick up this grease gun and you put it down again over near the cart, and that oils it, and it goes out of the way along its little track, and now it's out of the way.

And that's just a little bit, bit, bit, a little few frames of animation play. I mean, it's just, it's not animation. It's the same sprite appearing in different places on the screen until it's out of the way. And that's the thing about the original Dizzy. It had all of the components of a Dizzy game with the picking up and putting down of items to solve puzzles but it did everything in a really kind of stapled together at home kind of a way

and that goes for everything like the animation flickered when Dizzy would walk he would just like flicker in and out as if as if you know electricity was arcing through your spectrum and just like holding him together just barely and in fact that was reflected in something that they didn't do in any other Dizzy games which is that the first thing

thing that happens in the entire game is that pieces fly in from all four corners of the screen and form dizzy in this animation where he like rose from a central point into this egg and then when you die he flies apart again. They didn't ever do that again. That was really weird why they did that. That is really odd when we think about it. It raises some serious canon questions. Yes, it does. And what you do is you go around this world doing these puzzles and the purpose is to make a potion. You are making the Averwif of E potion. And I spent my life wondering why it's called that.

The Averwitha V potion. So I tweeted the Oliver Twins at one point a few years ago. Like, why is it called the Averwif of E potion? And they did answer and they just said, because it's smelly. Yeah, Averwif. I got that immediately. Of like of the. Yeah, well, I didn't because I was nine. We didn't tweet them when you were nine.

No. There was no Twitter. No, but it's like, you know how like, do you ever watch something on TV that was from the time when you were a child? And you still think that the people in it are like older than you to look at, even though they're about 17 or whatever. Of course I think that. Yes, of course.

But do you know what I mean? It's that thing where the perspective is locked into your brain. I don't mean to shame you about the avowice of the potion because I didn't get Miles per hour until I was like 26 or something. Oh, well, and I'm completely vindicated. Yeah, you are absolutely vindicated. Also, I found out about a month ago, and this is genuinely true.

Paul Simon is the Simon from Simon and Gough Uncle. I genuinely didn't realize that. I was like, oh, it's the most obvious thing in the world ever. They just didn't know. All right. So the first Disney game, right? You're making a potion because the evil wizard Zax, which is a weird name. It's Zax.

And that's caused all sorts of trouble with people thinking his name is Zach and it's like Zach apostrophe S Zach's thing. But no, it's Zach's Z-A-K-S. It's not Zach. That's just stupid. Why would a wizard be called that?

No, why would it be called that? And it's not Zach's... This is the Mighty Wizard Zach. No. No, exactly. Mighty Wizard Zax. That's more like it. Zax.

Now you're talking. It sounds like a magic spell exploding, wasn't it? Zax! Yeah, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. And that's the sort of thing that happens with him. Well, he is bad, and he's, I don't know, about. So you've got to make a potion. It's a bout. He's around. Beedle. Yeah. And you've got to make this potion out of different ingredients. Now, this is the first of our two. And if I'm, I can stretch it out to three, Danger Mouse references. Because there was an episode of Danger Mouse, which was called like the four tasks of Danger Mouse, which is exactly the same premise. He has to go and find, four things. Now, the four things he has to find are different, except one, which is, have you

got there a list of what the things are? Because I can't remember them off the top of me out there. I'm sorry, but I don't. Not to worry. So you haven't got a tape of Dizzy, the ultimate cartoon adventure sitting at the desk. I haven't, but that actually also leads me into something, which I will discuss after your, uh, finished with this. Current screen. Okay. So, yeah, the, the ingredients, I can't remember them, except the last one, which is. vampire ducks feather. That's ducks with an X, I believe. Vampire Duck's Feather, which was the last thing that Danger Mouse had to get. Is that what introduced the character of Duckula? Yes, it was. Oh my God. Sorry, I totally jumped the reveal there. I apologize. No, no, no.

We reached the reveal organically, I feel. I just got excited about Duck. Exactly. You've figured it out. That's exactly right. Yeah, the Vampire Duck from this one gag in one episode of Danger Mouse Span off to be one of our favorite cartoons of the 80s. Oh, God, I love the nuclear so much. Yeah, and also span off to be one of my favorite game series of the 80s. So, like, hell yeah, thank you that episode. Itself not that great of an episode, but, you know, so that's two references. The other is that the whole thing is sort of weirdly, it weirdly ties in with this poem

about the green eye of the little yellow god. Something, something, something on the Isle of Catmando. Now, I remember the Danger Mouse episode called The Bad Like I of a Little Yellow God. It was the episode before the one with the duck's feather in it. So clearly, or at least it is currently on Netflix in that order. So, clearly these two boys have been watching Danger Mouse across the two weeks that they made dizzy. And they just put all this stuff in. There's a little red-eyed idol into the north of Kathmandu.

There's a little marble cross below the town. there's a there's a lady who's crying at the grave of Mad Caroo and the something something something something and it's quite a good little poem but Dizzy has all of these references to it the idol is there

in fact it's on the title screen you get a jewel and you put it in its eye and this jewel looks quite like the one that was in Danger Mouse there's the little marble cross below the town is there in the game and I think it says it on a scroll at the top stuff like that yeah And then you get that together

and you put it in the cauldron that's on the first screen and you defeat the Evil Wizards Act, except you don't because nobody's ever finished the game. It's too difficult to point. Yeah. Well, there's that one stream with that, like, bird or whatever. It's just not possible to get parts, isn't it? Can't do it?

Yeah, that's the other thing. There's stuff coming to kill you. There's apples falling from trees. There's spiders dangling down. And there's birds and there's raindrops and there's birds that just come at you. And they just come at you and they kill you if they get you. And that's it.

Something that's very common in 8-bit platform games like this, especially screen-by-screen ones. I mean, maybe this is a little phenomenon. I don't think it's really been noted, but there's always a screen with a little pissy little flying thing that's really erratic that always kills you.

Always. Yeah. Every time. Yeah. Even the future Disney games have this. Yeah. But yeah. What I wanted to say, well, what I was hoping is I could rope you into doing

the entire docular intro, but maybe we'll save that for another podcast, the other time. job. I can be wrote into doing Ducula. That's good. Yeah. God,

Ducula was good. But you know what's crazy is my first Spectrum game was the Ducula game. Um, Count Ducula, no sacks,

please, we're Egyptian. Yeah. Um, it sucks. It's absolutely awful. Yeah, it was a child.

Absolutely atrocious game, but I, when I was a kid, obviously, it was great. He does a really rubbish, scratchy version of the theme song. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do,

do do do, how you know, it's good. Yeah. What I wanted to say is when you mentioned about me holding a little dizzy tape in my hands. When I, the time when I met the Oliver Twins, it was at the Computing Museum in Cambridge, the Museum of Computing History, which is essentially a retrogaming museum which rules you should definitely go

sometime you would get a kick out of it I think cool everyone listening if you ever in Cambridge tweet me on Twitter at Supercarbara and I will run to the community museum with you a full sprint but anyway Philip and Andrew Oliver came to the museum to do like a kind of meet like day

and one of the things that they brought with them was the original source code for Dizzy the Ultimate Cartoon Adventure. Oh, God. And I held in my hands the very discs that contained the original code for Dizzy

in an envelope which had been drawn on with markers in the 80s saying Dizzy, the ultimate cartoon adventure. And as I held it in my hand, I became briefly sort of emotional because...

Yeah, you should. You would, wouldn't you? Yeah. And then my head began to... To it, the cogs began to turn, and I thought to myself, imagine my notoriety if I were to destroy this. Yes. Like, as soon as I had it, that's all I could think about, was like, it would be so funny for a second, like a fraction of a second.

Yeah. The abstract idea of being the person who destroyed the original source code for Dizzy. Yeah, you could be like whoever it was at the BBC that burns those Doctor Who's. it's the call of the void like you do it but no I was able to successfully return the original source code to the London I'm very proud of you, well done

it was frankly irresponsible of them to be handing it to people in the Vosso they were very cavalier with it I mean maybe it wasn't actually the original source coat maybe it was a problem but who knows but the thing is also it doesn't matter doesn't it I mean like we've all got the wrong memory it doesn't matter

but they gave me the emotion they were very nice people who were very nice to me as well and yes I've heard they're nice I only visibly upset them once. What would you do? I think it was Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. It may have been spellbound,

but I can't remember. It's one of the ones they didn't make, and I didn't realize they hadn't made it. And they were talking about the humor in the games being very family-friendly, and I said, what about the one where there's a whip in Daisy's bedroom? That's got to be like an innuendo, like joke.

And they said, there was no actual agro, but there was a genuine tension you can tell. And there was just like, yeah we wouldn't have put something like that in a Disney game we wouldn't have done that and I was like oh I'm really like I'm sorry I didn't know that that wasn't yours I'm not as up on my Disney lore as I thought I was I apologize yeah but it was the genuine you just got this quick for a song of like yeah don't talk to us about that we don't want to know about those

games well that's that's my miles per hour I never got that yeah I never got that yeah well it's probably, you know, it may be it's just innocuous, but it's the kind of thing where you kind of, you know, hey, hey, what's the... Yeah, no, I think, yeah, I think... What's that I'm getting up to, you know? Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that is an example of that, yeah.

Yeah. You know, I've been thinking about, before I came on, I was thinking about how do we... I should just said this at the beginning. How do we get Americans who are going to listen to this podcast to not dismiss Dizzy and to understand, or at least to open their hearts to understanding How do I get them ready to think about Dizzy?

It's a Metroidvania. Just tell them it's a Metroidvania. They'll love it. They love them. Here's what I came up with. Because it isn't a Metroidvania, is it? It'd be nice if it was. It is a bit.

It has some of the elements of Metroidvania. Yeah, it's got an open world. Once you've got things, you've unlocked doors and stuff, yeah. But you haven't really powered up Dizzy, though. Oh, except when you get that whip, because then you can Indiana Jones swing across. That's true. No, I'm just saying that to try.

try and get them on side. Well, here's what I've got. Here's what I've got. I think this is a good starting point. It doesn't really map on one-to-one or even at other numbers. It doesn't map on at all. But just as a mode of thinking about it, I think Dizzy occupies a similar place in gaming history in the UK, as Mega Man does in America, right?

Specifically, it has a very important place in the history of gaming and the lives of everyone who was fortunate enough to, played the games as they came out. But if you weren't fortunate enough and you've tried to play them since, on first impression, they are a bit too hard and fussy for you to stick with long enough to find the appeal. And that appeal might be just tied up in the time and place they were released anyway, but that doesn't make them not good or not worth knowing about. Dizzy was the most, we have to get this across. Dizzy was the most popular gaming mascot here. I'm led to believe that he was out selling Mario and Sonic at one point

when both of those things were out. Disney is not niche. Dizzy was huge. No, yes. A big egg. A big egg. Oh, God, I love that joke so much. Sorry.

Dizzy was Tom Cruise, as well as I'm concerned. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I don't know where I'm going with that. He was a risky business. No, Dizzy was the game. And because the games were not expensive either, that they were budget level,

or near budget. Yes, that's worth mentioning. Which is probably worth mentioning, because back in the day, you could, and this was slightly before my time, I would say, but you could go to, say,

W.H. Smith, so really anywhere. Yeah. And you would be able to buy spectrum tapes for what? $1.99 budget games? Yep, that's right. Yeah.

Initially, I think when the original did, they've gone up a bit by the time the game's finished, but yes, I think the original ones were two pound and you could get them from the chemist anywhere.

Yeah. That's British for the drug store. Yeah. I think it wasn't until Crystal Kingdom when they tried to make it big like 2599 kind of... Yes, we'll get there, won't we? Yeah, we will. I'm sorry, I keep jumping here to Crystal Kingdom. Yes, stop it. We haven't even got... We haven't even, we haven't... How many far, far, three are? We haven't... One. We haven't... One. We have 14 minutes in, and we've done one game. Right. Well, let's stop on Dizzy, then, because that's it. This is the experience you're going to get on Britronauts, and it's going to be enjoyed for us all. Well, there's not...

There's nothing else to say about the original Dizzy. That's it. Oh, there's one thing. There's one thing. There's the word, never mind the bird. The worst screen is this one screen where there's a kind of a earthy bridge. Oh, yes, the bridge. There's a pit under it, and there's a skeleton in the pit. And if you go on, if you go across that bridge, there's a way of going across it. And I can never remember what that way is.

I think you kind of have to jump over the little crack in the middle, but I'm not sure. But there's a way of going on that bridge that's wrong, and everyone goes on the bridge that way. And it collapses out from under you. you're now stuck in the pit, and you die because you hit some spiky or whatever, and you respawn in the pit. Ah, yes. So that's it. You're stuck.

Jet set Willie. Jet set Willie. Yeah. Yeah. You have to reset your computer. Yeah. Now, here's another thing I want to explain to people about British games of this era. Please.

Again, those who have been reading me, my stuff will be aware of this already, but I just want to get it across. Sometimes these games would be broken. Yes. They would not be finishable, or they would have huge bugs. Jet Set Willie, one of the biggest, most popular spectrum years of all time, had a bug where if you leapt onto a screen and then died before you landed, you would respawn in the spot where you died infinitely until all seven of your lives were gone. There was nothing you could do about it. Also, it was programmed incorrectly and it was impossible to finish.

Yeah, that's the main. You couldn't get the last item. You couldn't get the last item, which was slightly more major. Now, the thing you need to understand is no one got any death threats over this. Because back then, people understood that these games were made by small children. Yeah, and never got that far anyway. Yeah, no one's finished JetSitwilly without using pokes. I don't believe them if they say they have.

So rather than patch the game or re-release the game, they put a poke in the games magazines like Crash and CVVG, which you would then enter in to essentially reprogram that part yourself to fix it and this was, here's the most messed up thing and I say messed up, it's not messed up I just, you're going to think it's messed up this was fine, this was not anti-consumer

this was just what happened but British people just went oh well, not to worry well, I'll tell you why, these things happen it was because now games companies have spent so including in codemasters, which we're going to get into, have spent so long trying to legitimize themselves

as these Mr. Billy Big Ball companies that when they do something wrong like this, they've asked 70 quid off you these days. And it's a problem. Well, and of course it's not a problem because they just patch it and it's fixed. But whereas back then, first off, they were two pound. You got them down the post office. They felt like they didn't matter. And yet you enjoyed them so much that that balance was strongly tipped in favor of them being a good thing. And so you felt very good about them. But also, they felt like something handmade by your friend for your birthday or whatever. Like if someone, do you know what I mean? If someone like made you a birthday card rather than bought one and gave it to you and it had all bits coming

off it and springy bits and things, that's what computer games felt like at the time. To the extent that like they would have, I remember a couple of games that I had on the spectrum, where the title screen was just text scrolling past of the bloke who programmed it, just chatting with you, just being like, hello, this is my new game. I sat here, my cat did some of the programming when he walked on the keyboard. I drank a lot of lemonade during this. I recommend you get the one from Bold Street. This isn't even an exaggeration.

This is just you and genuinely what it's like. Yeah. The thing about the cat is an actual one. so yeah that's what games felt like it felt like something someone had handed you and you were just having a bit of a muck about with and that was it there was no anger involved rather than be now

rather I mean it's similar to the warring of nowadays but like this was also true of the Atari 2600 to be fair but it would be more like oh the new game by this guy is out and it's not a company it's this guy like Matthew Smith's new game is out yeah the Oliver Twins new game

Yeah, the Oliver Twins, Philip and Andrew Oliver's new game is out. Let's buy it. It's not Codemaster's new game. It's Philip and Andrew Oliver's new game. Yeah. The games are authored. They have authorship. They haven't had the personality stripped from them systematically, you know,

like Codemasters have now after being bought by EA. And that's why it was okay that the original dizzy looked so scrappy and staple together. Like, it was well done. Well done. You've made a cartoon that runs on my computer. Well done. No disrespect intended to the employees of codemasters there. I'm sure that they're all a great bunch of lads.

Well, but this is the thing. There's no one's exempt from this now, except for maybe like Toby Fox and, you know, Zalman. There's like a couple of people who are still making games the way they were made in 18. And every single time they do, they get accolades and applause for doing it because it's what we like the most. Yes. Need some adventure in the history of the history of sci-fi-fi, fantasy, and horror.

What Mad Universe is a podcast where two guys delve into the history of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, and the impact it's had on pop culture. Everything's the same. same politically, but we have Rayguns. The actual motive isn't to explore something that's quote scientifically possible. But neither is Star Wars, and I know there's arguments about that, but I would definitely consider

Star Wars science fiction. You haven't read Dune. No, I haven't. You can never be the Quizette's Hedderach. What Mad Universe on the HyperX podcast network. Hi, we're Ellen. Stephen. And Mark. Hosts of Nice Games Club, the show where nice game devs talk gaming and game development.

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It seems like everything these days is getting more expensive, and HyperX is doing its part to fight the battle with deep discounts across all categories of HyperX gear. Head there quick, though. Once March ends, so does the madness. It's the HyperX Lute Drop 2, going on now at HyperX.com. But it kept selling that's the most games would sell for a brief period and then drop off, but Disney did not. It sold and sold and sold. It didn't do gangbusters, as Dave said, but it sold sadly enough that Covemasters were like, hmm, there's something to this egg.

Yeah. I would say that this egg is sunny slide up. I don't know what that means. So they made another one. They made another one that was called Treasure Island Dizzy. and it came out in 1989, and it's a pig. It's a pig of a game. I mean, it's not bad, but it's a big.

It's evil. What does pig mean in this case? It's not, it's too hard. Yes, it's not. It doesn't feel like your friend, does it? I keep getting caught in the cage every time I forget that the cage is there. So this is because, yeah, there's, so Treasure Island Dizzy, right? Treasure Island, or as it calls itself,

Treasure Island is a game in which you are dizzy stuck on a Treasure Island and you're just trying to get off. You're just trying to make a boat and get off the island, basically. And it's like the original Dizzy, but sort it out. You know, they've kind of got it working now.

Polished up, yeah. And still not as polished as future titles will be, but it's sort of, if there was a midpoint between Grand Day Out and the wrong trousers, Treasure Island Dizzy is it. fantasy world is the wrong trousers. Perfect.

Now you've made to be fantasized about a spectrum wrong trousers game, but you know it would be amazing. Oh, just think. Somebody make that. So, Treasure Island is he? Did you know that one of the darlings, which is, I don't mean just nice people, I mean the darling brothers who were the two brothers who were codemasters.

Yes. One of them, David, darling, I want to say. Do you mean the people of, box quote absolutely brilliant fame because they used to put on their games on their box quotes absolutely brilliant and the quote was from the darlings like the owners which is amazing amazing drifting but yeah it was just a company tagline absolutely brilliant not a not a review score at all um well one of them says uh that the reason it was treasure island i'm sure the oliver twins probably have their own idea which was just like yeah we just wanted to we watched

an episode of... Yeah, because it was on in the background when we were making the game. Probably. Probably. But whichever darling it is attributes this to a company policy they had at the time,

which was that they wanted everything to be like popular themes. They wanted all their games to be based on popular themes. And that's why they weren't sure about Dizzy because it wasn't, oh, BMX, that's popular.

We'll have BMX simulator. Pinball, that's popular. A pinball simulator. No, this was just something these guys had made up. And they were like, well, Oh, no. He doesn't like eggs.

Yeah. Very popular thing. Everyone loves eggs. I don't know that vegans hate eggs. They just don't eat them. It's not that they hate them. It's just that they choose to avoid them, which I think is, you know. They choose to avoid them.

Oh. Hey. You crazy bastard. Oh, two good jokes. One episode. Yeah, absolutely banging about this episode's idea. Yeah. The viewers, the listeners are probably in stitches.

I bet. they're probably tumbling around like Dizzy himself. Yeah. See, my argument to David Darling is that the popular theme that the original Dizzy was was cartoons. Yes. That's a popular theme. And, you know, whatever, they published it, so it obviously dawned on the other than it was good.

He thinks that it was Treasure Island because that is a popular theme. And so it's like, Dizzy, well, yeah, sort of, you know, like, Dizzy plus Treasure Island. Yeah, you know, Tread, like, you know, oh, Jim, lad, lad, all that. Come on, peg legs. Yeah, treasure in an island. I thought it was going to say all of our games have to be set on a treasure island, because that would be quite funny. That'd be quite good gimmick for a company, actually.

Yeah, Treasure Island Games. Yeah, the company's called Treasure Island Games, and they're all set on the same Treasure Island, but they're all different. That'd be wicked, actually. That would actually be amazing, yeah. Can I just say that I'm really fond of the type that this game is called Treasure Island Dizzy. It's not called Dizzy on the Treasure Island. It's not called Dizzy goes to Treasure Island.

It's called Treasure Island Dizzy, thus creating what can only be described as an iconic syntax. You're right there. It's because it was my ninth birthday. It's just normal to me. I feel as if there was some precedent for that sort of syntax already, but I don't know what it would have been. Maybe.

You know, you didn't have like name of country James Bond, did you? No, it's true. That would be good, though. It would. Moon James Bond. Moon James Bond That's now the name of that film And if anyone refers to it by any other name

They're incorrect Scotland James Bond What you mean Sean Connery Well I meant Skyfall actually But that also works Because then it would just mean Scotland James Bond 2 Scotland James Bond 3 There is in Treasure Island right

And there's a few things Rubbish James Bond There's a few things Different about this game And one of them The key one of them The key one is that you are now able to carry three items, but you've got one life. See, in the original Dizzy, you had lives at the top represented by little eggs, and you could pick up, you could like get extra lives.

Very rarely. There was like, I don't know, five of them hidden around the game, but you could pick them up and you could get an extra egg. In this, you've only got the one life. And unfortunately, that is paired with one-hit kill traps. There's no way of knowing a coming unless you know the layout of the level. So everybody falls for, and it's kind of a joke. Like, it's actually quite a good wheeze the first time. It's very early in the game, so it's not losing much time either.

As you walk, yeah, but then when you ever come back, it's still there. Oh, God. As you walk around through one of the first screens, there is a point, and this is actually there's, I think, two of these, maybe even three, but certainly two, where you'll just freeze on the spot where you happen to be walking, and a big cage will drop down on you from You know, you can't see the cage before it drops down there's no hint. And it drops down on you and that is you trapped and then you're dead and the game goes again. Now, there's a reason why, there's a practical reason why this game only had one life.

They weren't just being cruel. And it has to do with the other main difference about this game compared to the last one, which is that you can go into the sea in this game. And this was incredibly exciting. Now, Dizzy will drown immediately when you go in the water. but one of the items you can find is an aqualung and another of the items you can find is a pair of flippers and if you've got the aqualong you can essentially treat the seabed like it's just the floor

and if you've got the aqualung sorry if you've got the flippers you can swim around as well brilliant and that's great it causes problems though which is that the way the inventory system works in this game is that it's got three positions for items and they just cycle so if you've got three things and you pick up a fourth thing you're going to drop whatever is in the lead position in your list of items. And that goes for using items as well. You have to cycle things until the one you want to use is at the front and then you drop it.

At least I think that's how it works. That is how it works, yeah, yeah. So what that means is that if you've got like an item that you have to have underwater to be alive and you just forget this stupid mechanic and you pick something, you try to pick up an item, you're going to drop your aquilung and you're going to immediate. drown. And while they were making the game, when you are making a game, you just like,

you know, you just run it and you drop yourself in whatever screen you want to play test and you just try things out. So they never realized that what would happen under those circumstances if you dropped the aquilung and drowned is that the game would respawn you next to the dropped aquilon

without the aquilon. And you drown again instantly, exactly like that pit in Dizzy One. And it was like, I think, three days. before it had to be mastered and sent off to Codemasters. And they were just like, oh, no, oh, we haven't got time to reprogram this. So they just made it that you never respawn at all

because you've only got one life. Beautiful. That's why. It's glorious, isn't it? I love it. It's so homemade. What a beautiful fix that is. What a beautiful fix that is.

It's seamless. I love it. Treasure Island to me as one as the I want to mention real quick because we I think we should move on from Treasure Island Dizzy

but I want to mention very quickly that this game is also available for the Americans out there on the NES as part of the Quattro Any old it, any old it, any old it is. As part of the Quattro Adventure cartridge, which is a very, very

nice cartridge, by the way, because it also has a boomerang kid, Linus Spacehead, and Super Robin Hood, which is another one of a Twins game, and a really good one too. So, yeah, I recommend that. The original Disney was not released on the Nespa. I will be informing you which ones you can get on consoles as we go along.

You're not missing anything, really. No. Now, I feel like we should give short shrift to the arcadey ones because let's face it, nobody cares about them, but we'll... I care a little bit. I'm going to mention them briefly. Oh, you do not. You do not care about them. Nobody does not kidding.

There's a couple of quite good ones, but there's a lot of bad ones. But, okay, my main issue is that I feel like we should talk about the mainline games in more detail. I agree. For timing purposes, we should give shorter shrift to the arcade ones. That's my only theory. And the next one, of course, of course

is fast food 1989. Not fast food disease, just fast food. Yes. Which if memory serves is the Pac-Manish one. Am I wrong there? Is it the Batman? No, that's absolutely right. It's nakedly Pac-Manish. Yes. Naked Pac-Man. Nothing

more erotic that I can imagine than naked Pac-Man. No, quite. This is one in which you have a maze. You're looking at a maze like in Pac-Man are less complex maze. And the difference is you're not eating dots. You're eating burgers and milkshakes and fries and pizzas and things. And they

And they are running away from you and moving about. So you're chasing after this food. And there are four monsters, and they're sort of, I don't know, like lumpy guy things. They're not ghosts. They're ghosts with legs, basically. And it's legally distinct from Pac-Man. But only, like, even, they copied it even to the level that, like, every few levels, you get a little cutscene, like one where, you know, Dizzy is being chased by a monster off the screen.

and then he comes back in a big steamroller and now he's chasing the monster and that's funny. It is funny. Those bits are good and I believe they had those in Pac-Man, did they?

They did, yeah. They did. Yes. So they did that. And so that was what it was. There you go. Yeah. It's not a bad game.

I remember liking how breezy and quick it was compared to Pac-Man. Like, you can clear a screen quite quickly. It's difficult, but you're not spending quite so much time running rings

around ghosts, basically. It reminds me a bit more, and there's nothing like this, so this is a ridiculous comparison. It reminds me a bit more of Pac-Man Champion Edition where it's all very quick, basically. So, yeah, fast food, fun. A mainstay of the compilations, I believe. Yes.

To pad them out. But it's not bad. And also a remake of fast food is available on, well, what the hell is it called? Blitz Game Maker or something like that on the Switch. Is that right? Yeah, there is a game-making tool on the Switch, which the Oliver Twins made a fast food remake on. Right.

Their current company is called Blitz Games, I believe. That'll be it then, yeah. And it's really bad. So anyway, I'm not having to go at them. You know, they've made loads of great games. Right. But this is the thing, right? This is the thing about the Oliver Twins.

And this is why they made these arcadey ones, is that the Oliver Twins are like, they're just like jobbing games guys. They're not a Miyamoto where they had this vision or at least something that developed into one and they controlled this IP. They just would make any game they could think of. And often that would be the last game they played. They would make that and release them. Because that's what he did.

That wasn't something bad, by the way. That was what you did. Half the games on the spectrum were just like, here's Danky King. Do you know what I? Oh, I have con for the spectrum. Just con. And it is Donkey Kong, yes.

and so frankly the amount of like legally distincting that they did to fast food was more than was usually necessary on the spectrum and actually you know speaks of quite an artistic sense of creativity from them but they were very happy to just go around making whatever game presented itself to them that day for whoever would you know wanted it and would pay enough and if they had an idea they would make a game and if they thought of a puzzle they would do that and that was that was who they were and they just got on with things and that's quite cool about it them. And so, yeah, they never went like, oh, this, well, actually, that's not true. Sometimes they went, this doesn't fit the Dizzy brand. But generally speaking, they would make whatever they thought of, slap a Dizzy on it, and there you are. So as a result, there are... Slapp a Dizzy on it. I love that. Pretty much. Yeah. So there are games that I don't care about that are going to be coming up and that I won't trouble you with, because I don't know enough about them to even talk about them. But the next game, also in 1989, which is very busy year for Dizzy. busy dizzy

Izzy whizzy let's get busy conjure up another dizzy or whatever it was I forget That was what he said Yeah Izzy let's get busy

conjure up another Dizzy Something like that He's an egg Oh no That was it Is it No it's the

I was doing The Fantastic Dizzy bonus game Where it says Hocus Pocus Izzy Wuzzy conjure up under Dizzy

That's right I remember now The next game though This is I'm gonna go ahead And say it This is The White El

album of Dizzy Games. This is, this is. Why? I don't know. Well, it depends on your opinion of the white album. As soon as that left my lips, I thought, this is bullocks. Like, what am I saying? The rubber soul, the rubber soul of Dizzy Games. It represents a very clear evolution. Have I said the name of the game yet? Fantasy World Dizzy, just so I get that out there. Now, Fantasy World Dizzy is the one that I have spent the most time with as well. to me, it's Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Yeah. It's so much bigger.

It's so much more polished. Yep. It's the combination of everything they were doing in the previous games. It still nails hard. It still has unwinnable situations because it's a spectrum game. And it's still unfriendly. But it's also amazing. It's brilliant.

And everyone will enjoy it who plays it, even if you can't get anywhere. but you will enjoy it. Because every single screen has something cool and interesting on it. Yeah, and this is where that cartoon feeling has really solidified, and it just worked. The puzzles make intuitive sense now. Yes. And you always feel like you can do it,

and you will get there, and you'll work it out, and you'll be fine. And as far as I know, this was entirely made by the Earl of Twins, and it is their opus. It's their masterpiece. I played it.

I played it. in front of them with them as an audience and I beefed it harder than I've ever beefed anything in my life. Oh dear. Yeah,

it was embarrassing and afterwards I immediately left. Anyway, were there any particularly embarrassing beefy moments? No,

I think I didn't get that far past the Armourog, whatever it's called. I just was not on form. I was just not on form. Well, the thing about the Armourog is one of my all-time

favorite video gaming dick moves. And there's a difference between being unfair and being a dick, I think. Because there is an item in the Armorog's layer that you have to get to win the game. Yep. But if you feed the Armourog and then

don't get the item really quickly, you will never be able to get it because he will be there forever and he will be blocking it and you cannot. The Armourog listeners, is a nasty monster that runs towards you to get you and it runs into its cave in which is this item you have to pick up and you have to do it before

I believe it's one of the boulders you need to raise the water level, and it's essential. But what you do is elsewhere, you find a hunk of meat, and that makes logical sense, that Amrug is hungry. You drop the meat, and it pushes the meat into its layer, and then stays in there for ever eating the meat. So you can then get past it. And that's a good puzzle, because earlier, like right at the start of the game, you were basically strong-armed into feeding something to a monster to get away from it.

Yes, that's right, yeah. This game opens on a wonderful, perfect little tutorial that makes it the perfect place to start if you've never played a dizzy game, which is dizzy in a jail cell guarded by an ogre who won't let him out, and he's got this loaf of bread, and he's got this jug of water, because that's what he's allowed to eat, and there's a fireplace, and what you do is you pour the water on the fire to put it out, and now you can escape out the fireplace. place. And then you take the bread with you, there's a rat that you can't get past and feed it the bread. Now you can escape into the wider world. And now you know how to play Dizzy. It's brilliant. I don't remember if this was in the original, but there's also a shiny green apple in that room. Yes. And you can give that to the troll. He will say, like, oh, thank you. I can't accept this, but you might be able to get out if you pour the water. It tells you what to do. And that's brilliant. And that's what Dizzy is all about. Because that is like a British, cultural reference. You know, like Apple for the teacher? Yeah. And it's, but it kind of means that you're toadying up to him if you give it to him. So it's like you feel a bit slimy for having got that tip.

Yeah. Because you were like, oh, please, oh, please, sir. Here is a lovely shiny apple for you, sir. Will you let me out of prison, please, sir? It's like Cuthbert, cringe-worthy level of it. Yeah. Brilliant. It's just a really exciting game, honestly.

There's a bit where you jump across the jaws of a crocodile. and then you tie them together with a rope. Yeah, because they're snapping open and closed, and you have to time it so that you can just jump over it just through pure timing. Yes, you can. I think anyway, because it's snapping open and closed. You can, because you have to at least once, I think,

before you get the rope. Yeah, whereas if you tie it together, well, just to get onto it to do the rope, I think. And if you tie it together, now it can't open and close its jaws anymore. And you still have to get the jump right. You still have to not fall into the water. At least you've got three lives now.

They've also changed the HUD to the more, the inventory to the more what it will be from now one, basically, which is when you hit return or whatever button you hit to use items, you will pull up a menu with the items you are carrying and you will then select the item you want to use and then hit the button again to use it, which is both, well, it's 100% better than what it was before, but a million percent better. Yeah, a million. And it's the way that it stays from now on. Yeah.

Thank God. They figured it out. They figured everything out. The whole formula sorted out and never needs to change again for the whole of the rest of the series. And you know what else this game introduces? The yoke folk?

The effing yoke folk. Dizzy's got some friends now. There was... This being back in the day, there were little stories in the tape inlay up till now. And there's been mentions of a grand-uncle Jock McDizzie and things like this. There's this sense that there are other egg people. But now we meet them. Yeah.

So there's Daisy, who's the girl one. That's Dizzy's girlfriend. And because she's a girl, and it's 1980, whatever it was, she's like a cheerleader. because that's the ultimate girl activity. Yes. Not that we had them here. That's like an American vision of girlness, but we adopted it for the purposes of Dizzy.

I believe they... I think they were copying... Like, each character is something that they'd seen somewhere else. There's a mention of Daisy Duke. There's a mention of somebody else. But I can't remember who. Maybe one of the people was a cheerleader. Maybe Daisy Duke's.

I've never seen the Dukes of Hazard. I don't know what Daisy Duke is. Maybe she's a cheerleader. My understanding is that Daisy Duke is a lady who wears some sort of sexy pants. Yes, some sort of sexy pants. That's all I know. And so she was like the girlfriend one who you're trying to rescue from the evil wizard, but not Zach's. A different evil wizard.

One of his mates, I guess. I guess. And other eggs include Dylan, who is, what's his name off the young ones, the hippie one? Yeah, me old from the young ones. Neil from the young ones. He's the hippie one. Yes, he talks more like Neil from the young ones, but he's called Dylan. So he's obviously got a bit of Dylan out of, you know, Magic Roundabout involved.

Also the hippie one in that. So he's the hippie one. He's great. He's pretty great. There's Denzel, who's the cool dude one. So he's the sunglasses, personal stereo wearing one. He's a bit like the Fons. What else?

There's Dozy, who's Dozy, you know, the dwarf from Snow White, he's the Dozy, he's at sleep. He's having a kip. Leave him alone, Dizzy. Yep, yeah, a sleepy one. And there's Grand Dizzy. Oh, and there's Dora. Yeah. Dora was meant to be Velma and Grand Dizzy was meant to be Grandad off Only Fools Norses. And that's basically, that's basically the set up.

You've just got these characters, Dora Dizzy's sister. She's a bit sensible, and that's what I'm less that. She has a nice sort of bun haircut as well which I quite like an egg with a haircut It's always appealing An egg with a haircut, exactly That's what you need Once you've had your main character

The way to come up with side characters Is to give that character different haircuts And that's what they did in this instance I think that the art for Dylan is iconic I love it every time I think about it It makes me very happy It's dead good It is really good

Yeah And they're all knocking about around the world Now I'm not sure if in this game They actually are instrumental in any of the puzzles but they do talk to you and they can offer you sort of hints or where to go or what advice sort of thing. Nothing too overt.

The main thing they do is nothing too overt like an egg. Hey again, like a bag, yeah. The main thing they do is... I guess we're going to turn into his store's eye in a minute and nobody wants that. The main thing they do is they're just on the title screen going here we are.

They've got their names all under. They're all there and they've got their names and then you meet them around the world as you go about the place. I can't remember what most of them do or even which ones... I don't know if you meet them all. I just know you meet Dozy

because he's sitting in a deck chair on the edge of the docks and you can kick him in the sea and he floats away and he never see him again. The game has actually got quite a lot of little bits of personality in it like that, like one of my favourite things.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, there's a bottle of whiskey on one of the earliest screens in the game. Yes, you're right. Now, if you pick up the whiskey, Dizzy drinks the whiskey. Yes. And then his controls go,

will poohy. And you can't really do anything anymore because you can't really control Dizzy anymore because he's too pissed. Yeah. What I think it is is that, I don't know, I don't think it reverses your controls. I think it's the long, it makes sense, every couple of seconds, you just roll. Yeah. They'll just start rolling around. Now, this is the kind of thing that makes my heart sing, because it's a utterly pointless. Yeah, it does nothing. It's just, it's nothing more than a gullible, like a sucker trap, basically. Yeah. But, But it's one of those, it doesn't just kill you. It just, it makes you think maybe this has some kind of purpose.

But it doesn't. It's just to make the game even harder to the point of being essentially impossible. Yeah. Because you have no precision anymore. I assume it wears off, does it? I don't think it does. I've never survived long enough in that state. No, that's it.

You have to just not drink it. It's like a don't touch this temptation thing. Because as well as all this walking back and forth, by the way, these are very vertical games. You're climbing up castle ramparts and things. So there's always this risk of just falling to your death. I mean, there's a room in Fantasy World Dizzy where there's like one pixel you can perch on. And if you fall off it, there's just a load of knives at the bottom of the drop. It's just the spikes room in the castle. And that's all that's then. Don't think of like a Mario or Sonic pit with some spikes at the bottom of it. No, it's just this one place in the castle where there's

just a shaft and some spikes. And you have to jump over it. And you have to jump over it. And you have to know it's there or you'll fall into it. There's a lot of having to know where things are. And there's a lot of pixel-perfect jumping in the games, actually. There's also a lot of things that can kill you that you don't expect to kill you, like the torches in the background. Yes, just torches mounted on the walls. You can't jump past them.

If you touch them, you will instantly die. Yeah. I think in this one you also need to collect all of the coins to finish it. We didn't mention that. We forgot to mention that about Treasure Island. One of the key things is that, yes, you have to collect. there's I think 40 coins hidden around the map and they in the case of both games they deliberately hid them I mean the original reason why they had those coins was because they just

liked the idea of making the game extremely explorable and having all these places that are hard to get to but if they didn't necessarily have a reason for you to get there they would hide a coin there and just be like there you go see if you can get there and some of them were so well hidden and this again was deliberate you know you know you sometimes hear that like meamoto when he made the original Zelda, he wanted you to talk about it in the playground, and that's the only way to find out what's hidden in what bush or whatever

is by some kid randomly finding it and then word spreading. And these days, that creates game of rage because they're like, oh, you're supposed to buy the guidebook? No, you were supposed to play it with friends and have all the time in the world and figure it out. Well, the same was true of Dizzy, two and three. They hid some of these coins

behind scenery. So you had to like like there were just railings everywhere. You had to think to go behind one and press the button as if to pick it up like an item. And Dizzy did. And then there was a coin behind it. Stuff like that. Beautiful.

There's also the one that's in the room which is essentially an invisible maze. Oh. Oh, the maze. It's called what? The illusion. Yes. And what it is?

Yeah, you explain it better than me, I think. Well, I didn't really let you try. So maybe you'd have been good at it. But nevertheless, imagine a room full of yellow boxes to jump on of all different sizes. Here's the problem. All of the non-jump-onable space in the room is also yellow boxes. So you just, and I think in different versions, the boxes might have been different colors, perhaps. But I think on the spectrum, they're all the same color.

And you develop this second sense for it where, like, as you've done trial and error to figure out what boxes you jump onto. Those ones just stick in your memory and you start to see them as jump onable boxes. And the problem is of course that some of the jump onable boxes are like above you so they're blocking your way. So you're knocking into them and falling down

and it's tremendously difficult to figure out where they are. It's a very good room. It's a very important. The only way that's the kind of thing where people would send in hand drawn maps to Crash magazine who would then print them like here's how you get through the illusion on Fantasy World Disney.

Beautiful days, beautiful days. There are some really good puzzles in that game. Yes. There's a little cow. It does a cow pat. You go down, I think it's a well or something, and you end up in Australia, and everything's upside down,

and there's a shopkeeper there, and it says, and as if by magic, the shopkeeper appears, just like in Mr. Ben, which presumably they were watching while they made this game. Beautiful. From him, you can get,

is it from him, you get a magic bean? Because he's also the shopkeeper out of Jack and the Bean store. Yeah, it's been a while. And then you plant that in the cow pat, and that grows a beanstalk. And now you can go up to, I guess, because you're trying to get to a castle in the clouds. So maybe that's how you get to it.

Maybe that's the end of the game. Is this the game that introduces the trope of the clouds that Dizzy sinks through very slowly? I was trying to figure that out, or if that's the next one. Yeah, you can, in Dizzy, you can walk on clouds, but for a very limited time, you are always sinking through, which made total intuitive sense to me because I... Absolutely. One of the first things They're cloud

Well, yes, one of the first things I saw on video ever Was Dumbo Which opens with this bit of the stalks sitting on the cloud And putting the wrapped up Dumbo baby bag on this cloud And it's sinking through And he has to keep hoisting it up

And putting it on the cloud So I knew you can be on a cloud For a little while And you'll start to sink through And that's how cloud physics work in Dizzy And I bet that's what they were referencing. Yeah, you have to keep jumping To keep your footing on the cloud

But you know, you have to to make sure you're not holding a direction when you do that or you're going to jump off the cloud and then you're going to tumble and roll and flail all the way down to the floor and probably fall in the... And there might even be birds or bats flying around to make things even more awkward.

You never know. Although I think haven't they kind of dialed back on the birds and bats and stuff by this time? I feel like they're not really a problem. Possible. Prince of the Oak folk definitely has some. So that's a much lighter. Yeah, I'm sure it does in the clouds.

They're not instantly kill you, though. They just stun you. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a problem when you're in the clouds. It's a huge. problem, yeah. But is there anything more to say about Fantasy World Dizzy? The heart from it's brilliant.

It's just brilliant. Everybody really liked it, and it's kind of held up. Oh, I'll tell you one thing that they did that was interesting with Fantasy World Dizzy, was that they set up a helpline. And the puzzles in this were so, you know, they were still kind of tricky,

even if they could work them out. And they had this helpline where they got their sister to record like just herself onto tape reading out a complete solution to the game and they cut it into four bits and they set up these four helplines I think either that or it's one and then you press the key that you want and you yeah you dial in like what quarter of fantasy world dizzy you want to listen to the solution to I got my mum to phone in because she could like write faster than me and try and write down

the whole thing as fast as she possibly could and she did I don't know why she didn't have to do this, but, you know, she did it for me. She wrote it all down. And, you know, as soon as she got off the phone, she was like looking at her notes going like, I'm sorry, David, I don't, I can't read this. I don't know what I've written because she was writing it so fast in shorthand. And that was... Shorthand. That's a lost start. Well, I don't know that she was writing in short hand. I think she was just writing in scribbly wiggles. Well, anyway, that helpline brought in more money for them than like their cut of the royalties from the game did.

So that is Fantasy World Dizzy. And now, now we move on to my favourite. No. Quick snacks. What? Did that come out first? It did. Quick Snacks again in 1989, the four Disney games in one.

I never. I'll tell you why I got mixed up. It's because Quick Snacks didn't come. Quick Snacks was in the second Dizzy Collection, whereas Magic Lamb was in the first, so I guess I think of them as... I'm not familiar with Quick Snacks, but I understand it's a block-pushing game. Let me tell you a little bit about Quick Snacks. Yeah, let's make it quick. Okay. Quick Snacks is basically brilliant, but it's just not a dizzy game, so it's overlooked. Do you know what I mean? It's got dizzy in it, but it's not one of these adventure games. It's another arcadey one. What? Fast food, quick snacks.

Yep. Quick Snacks is the sequel to fast food, and that is what makes it so interesting. It is a fascinating look at a sort of alternate branching history of the development of Pac-Man in a way. Like in the way that, like, you know, like Rainbow Islands is a development out of bubble-bubble. And meanwhile, they could have just made another bubble-bubble that was more, oh, Mario 2 and the lost levels. Two branching directions for that, here is what happens. If you take Pac-Man, rejig it as fast food, and then write a sequel to that with this new concept. What you're doing in this is you have, it's more lively.

It's like, you know, round one. You have got a screen on which are a number of blocks that are just making natural paths through the level, or they're just in the way and they're here and there. Around the screen are all at once lots of pieces of fruit. One of them is flashing. You can collect them in any order, but if you collect the ones that flash, that's the best, you know, you get the most points that way. There are monsters going around. Here's where the blocks come in. almost all of the blocks, certainly in the first levels, are pushable.

Think of them as like, you know, ice cubes that you can push around. That's what they are in some of the levels. And as you push blocks, if you push them into another pushable block, you can push that block with the first block. And you can end up pushing big long rows of blocks and the screen wraps like Pac-Man. So you can push them off the right and they come in again on the left. You can crush baddies with this. And in fact, that's how you defeat baddies.

That's the only way you can defeat baddies. defeating baddies gets you more points, I think, or lives or something. Yeah, you get like little power-ups out of them. And that's the game, that's it. So what it means is that as you do this, the layout of the levels means that they're all neat little puzzles. There's a best way to do each one. You can get stuck, you can get, you know, blocked in, you can get hurt by a baddie,

or you can ace it and push these blocks around. And then between levels, you get these little bonus levels where there aren't any baddies, but now Dizzy can't stop. so if you press left you'll just slide left until you hit something and those levels are laid out so that there is one solution you know you press one direction slide one direction slide and you have to collect all the fruit on the level and there's a timer counting down it sounds like Chips Challenge which I believe came out of the same year

oh really that's interesting because they were trying to make a Chips Challenge dizzy but they just didn't they didn't get it out so if quick I've never played it If Quicksnax bears resemblance to it, then there you go. That's all I'll really mention about Quicksnack, except the most important thing about Quicksnacks, which is that the Spectron version, which is unarguably the definitive version of Quicksnax. In fact, there's even one version. I think it might be the C-64 version or the CPC version.

There's one version that's a different game altogether, and that game is Sonic 3D. There is a version of Quick Snacks. In which you are dizzy walking around, collecting... Flickies, they're just little things, and they follow you around in a train, and then you deposit them in the hole to end the level. In 1980, goodness, well, I suppose it's Flicky, isn't it? Only top down. Yeah, I forgot that Flicky also does that.

Okay, it's Flicky. Anyway. Flickie's great. Sorry, gone. Flickie's Wiki. Right, but the most important thing about Quicksnax is that the Spectrum version, the definitive version, was given to this one guy, and I wish he knew his name, sorry that guy to do.

and he was a very good coda, and he must have come from demo scene because he's really good at music, he can make all sorts of effects happen, and what he just chose to do, he's decided to do this, was rig up the best title screen that any Spectrum game has,

or maybe any game. The title screen of Quicksnax is incredible because the story of Quicksnax is that there are, I don't know why this is the story, it's irrelevant, but they're a band, the Dizzy Mob, they're called, They're a band. They've been on a grueling tour of Yokeland, and they're all, they're arguing about where to go on their holidays, and Zach's is sick of all the arguing and all the noise, and he banishes them all to the places that they each said. And so you have to rescue one egg from one land, which actually makes it really interesting, because that means that there's four different, like, themes and four different pieces of music that play on its level, rare in a ditty game. You normally get one in game and one title music.

but the title screen is a performance by the band The Dizzy Mob and it is done in the most amazing way there is a piece of music that this guy wrote who also did the title screen that starts off like this like that and when this starts what you see on screen is Grand Dizzy with a long Zizi top beard clapping in time with this

and then Daisy on the bass do do do do do do do do and Dylan on the keys it might be Denzel it's Denzel on the keys and Dylan is on the drums and he kicks in when the beat drops you get as ooh

and here's the thing this is why it's so good each of the four characters on the screen in the band are like keyed in to a track in the soundtrack that you can't see. So every time a note plays on the keyboard track, the hands of that egg move on the keys. Every time the drums go, that egg is playing the drums.

He's got a little symbol to play. He's got a little snare to play. Grand Dizzy is just dancing. He's just body popping and jumping around and like head banging and stuff. And then Daisy's on her bass. It's amazing. It's like... That does sound amazing.

pure demo scene but in a game you never see this stuff in a game it must have been a whole separate bit of program that had to be separate

from the main game it's incredible work it doesn't need to be there it sounds like the one the opening of Chuck Rock which was later obviously but that's a similar

that must have got the idea from this I mean probably that's a British game as well yes it is yeah you can tell but looking at it's ugly and the thing

and the thing is it might be the same coder, you know? It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible. That might be his trick. But yeah, go and listeners, look up the ZX Spectrum Quick Snacks intro. It's just phenomenal when you know what's going on under the hood, which you'll see. Yeah, so that's Quick Snacks. It's good. It's the last of the dizzy spin-offs that I care about. Yes, it is, because we're going to be giving the other ones extremely short shrift, like in comparison.

But now we do move on to Dave's favourite. Oh, we're out of time. No, we're not. That's not true. And it's a Magic Land Dizzy will release in 1990, which is, as you mentioned earlier, the first one made by, I want to say Big Red Software. That's right, Big Red software. Or at least just Big Red. I think we call them Big Red software, but they might just be Big Red. A game also released, we will go into detail, obviously, but this is also available on the NES as I want to say, Wonderland Dizzy. Yes, but only because they recently on Earth did. It was never actually really... No, I don't even think it was finished. Not the time. I'm not... I might be getting Wonderland Dizzy and Mystery World Dizzy next up because I think it's Wonderland Dizzy.

No, you're right, it's Wonderland Dizzy. It is a version of Magic Land Dizzy. But no, do tell us all about the beautiful Magic Land Dizzy, please. Okay, well, well, it's fantasy world, but more so. It's this real sprawling place. You really feel like you're... I don't know, like living in the page. of a European comic album or something.

It's wonderful. All of the stuff that happens in it is somehow inspiring and magic and cartoony and just brilliant. Like, it's all so great. I don't know, I don't know really how to explain it other than that. You've got the Yoke Fokka back, and this time each of them has been put under some kind of spell, and they each have to be separately rescued. One of the first ones you're going to find is that Dora has been turned into a frog, and she's sitting on a lily pad, and those lily pads are going to sink.

It's a bit like, you know, the clouds. You have to not drown in the water. Don't be on the lily pad for too long. But the thing is you can't get to the lily pad because there's some ghosts flying about and they've got little angry, happy faces. What I mean? You know, that kind of angry eyes, happy grin that ghosts have, they have that. You've got to go into a castle, which you get to by hopping along the fin of a shark

that's swimming about in the moat and you have to learn to time your jumps ever so precisely or learn to they're actually the way that I did it was as long as you start at the right moment you can just hold down left and jump

and you'll just hop like it'll incidentally swim back and forth underneath you as you happen to hop off it it's a very I want to bring this up because it's a very

microcomputer platform a thing to do basically in most games when you leap onto a moving platform you'd expect that the platform would carry you in this

and also later imprint of the oak folk, there are crucial weaving platforms that you have to move with. They do not carry you. You have to walk to the direction they are traveling or you will just slide right off them. It's very, it's unintuitive, but if you had a spectrum, you're fine with it. That's just how it is. Like, if you grow up with a spectrum, you're broken inside and all these things are fine with you. Yes. Yeah. So you end up at the other side of the moat, you're at the back door of the castle, brilliantly illustrated with an empty milk bottle and a bag of rubbish that have been left out by the prince neither of which has any function you can pick

them up but they have no function in the red herrings yeah um as a few red herrings actually in this one um over there there's the prince's castle up in his tower you find a power pill it says pp on it when you pick it up it says you've got the power pill what's a power pill folks that's what pacman eats to destroy ghosts so you go back to the ghosts they're now flashing blue as you touch them they poof away now you can pick up Dora you can take her back to the castle you can give it to the prince to kiss

and the two of them vanish off toward their own means that's the sort of thing you get in this game it's huge it's sprawling it has that open world feel you jump around in the clouds there's guys up there

there's puzzles going on up there there are tree house villages oh should say fantasy world dizzy and Treasure Island is he kind of jointly established what will be a dizzy trope going forwards of the tree house village.

I want to say fantasy world really solidified that. Just houses built into platforms, built into woods, basically is a popular motif in these games. Yes. There's some of that going on in this one. There's stuff like Dozy is asleep on a slab with a poisoned apple next to him, like Snow White.

You have to go and find a genie's lamp. If you ever rub that genie's lamp at any time, what will happen is a genie will come out and lightning will shoot out of him and it'll hit you and you'll die so you have to find a lightning rod place that down next to Dozy rub the lamp near him

the lightning comes out of the genie zaps him that wakes him up stuff like that Grand Dizzy is lost in a mirror and there's this epic moment because that's the other thing as the game goes on the stuff you're doing becomes more exciting

because it becomes more like out there and otherworldly there is this moment where you you jump through a magic mirror and now it's Alice in Wonderland now, or rather it's Alice through the looking glass now. So there's all chess pieces in there and they all hurt you and your

controls are reversed. So it's really, really hard to get through that room and Grand Dizzy's in there and you have to get him out. And it all culminates with Dizzy goes to flipping hell and the devil is there. Satan is down there in hell and he's like, listen,

I know I'm Satan and everything, but ooh, the evil wizard's axe. He's even worse. than me. So I want you to destroy him and bring his ring to me and we'll toss them into the cracks of Gehenna, which is like a Lord of the Rings thing. Like you get the, you get Zax's ring off him and you toss it into the lava and that's how to destroy Zax. Oh, it's epic. It's so cool. That is very cool. I like it a lot. And the thing is you'll never, you'll never do this without, I don't know how anyone ever, I just managed to finish the game. was because I was completely obsessed with it, and I followed a walkthrough that was printed

in an issue of whatever Crash or Y'L-Sinclair, which was very hard to follow because it was like L-L-L-R-R-L-R-U-R-U-R-D, and you lost your place constantly. You had to keep a little thing pointing to the bit you're on. But like, it was, I can't explain it, but it was amazing. And like, just getting through hell, there's all these, like, we talked about the flames of torches before. They're free. in hell, they're just zipping back and forth and you have to try and jump over them and you've got three lives.

It's so hard. Yeah, and no way to get more without pox or cheats. No, later there was a poke mania that came with a Yor-Sinclair dizzy issue where you could get yourself infinite lives. But that was far down the road. I didn't have that yet and I did play it through all myself. God, it was good.

Oh, I just, I love it. Would you say speaking, I'm not going to say, because that's what a stupid man would say. Of course. Would you say that speaking from a distance, from a distance approach, that Magic Land is better than Fantasy World? Well, here's the thing.

Magic Land is just the tile set from Fantasy World rearrange. You know what I mean? It's like the Oliver Twins put down everything that Big Red needed. And what Big Red brought to the table was, I guess, just like a sense of lively humor and a sense of comfortableness. Fantasy World Dizzy still has that, odd darkness that came with Treasure Island and the original Disney.

It has this strange, murky, like, the world is dangerous for you feeling, whereas Magic Land feels like a Magic Land, it feels like this lovely place to be, even though it is just as dangerous. It doesn't feel oppressive to be in, though. It feels lighthearted and sort of... It feels like you're exploring. Fancy free. Yes.

Fun and fancy free. It's real. Good. That is where the first dizzy collection drew to a close. And that was the one that I, that was where, and understand, everything we've talked about so far apart from Quick Snacks, I got on that one day, my ninth birthday. So Magicland was like the main one I wanted to play because, of course, I'd already played into Magiland.

And then there were these three prequel games, which were just like, here's even more. It was so exciting. Stunning, yeah. That was such a good birthday. And also, the instruction. booklet, when you unfolded it, had the, because it was just a folded up big bit of paper, and it had these drawings on of the characters. And they were, they're the art, now, like, iconic drawings of Dizzy standing there with his staff with an eagle and his Pith helmet,

and Daisy with her pom-poms and nice. And they were so well drawn that it really solidified the feeling of Dizzy, not as a couple of scrappy games that are starting to get good, but as like a proper franchise, as a thing that matters. As a thing that mattered, a set of characters and a world, like, it would not be a surprise if they'd been on CITV in a few weeks' time. Yeah, yeah. And around this stage, Dizzy was becoming so popular, they were in talks to do that, no doubt with someone like Cosgrove Hall.

Yeah, they have a Cosgrove Hall look about them, don't they? Yeah. And I suppose, Cosgrove Hall would have had words with them probably about the stuff they wrote off from Danger Mouse time. Yeah, yeah. but um and then we don't we don't want your stupid egg show we want to make avenger penguins hell yeah MagicLand Dizzy then, banger, Dizzy Banger.

It's a bigotie banger. Yeah. And now I'm going to speed through a couple of silly spinoffs that aren't really that's important. There's Dizzy Panic, which was a really, from my memory, is a really banal puzzle-ish game. I will defend Dizzy Pannock. I'll defend it. I had forgotten that Dizzy Pannock. is another one I care about actually

because all it is, you know those, hey listeners, did you ever have the Play-Doh machines where you had like a slidey, like a ruler with different shapes stamped into it and you plunged Play-Doh through it with a lever and it came out as a long tube, as a shape

or star or triangle? It's an exciting shape. Imagine that along the bottom of the screen, cut into circles, squares, triangles. You can move that left and right. That is all you can move. Above you, four pipes are dropping Tetris-like shapes of those types. Sometimes two shapes are falling at once.

You have to zip the thing back and forth to let the shapes fall down into the right holes. And it's slow and it's ponderous and it's easy and it's a baby game and that's where you turn it off. Unless you're a cool dude, in which case you keep playing it. And you find that it becomes every bit, every bit, every bit as good as any puzzle game that's good.

Because first off, the pipes get lower and particularly they drop down a little bit every time you get a shape wrong at which point it bursts into a cloud of puff of smoke and the pipes drop. So that's like Tetris, you know, it's less far for them to drop. And they're speeding up

and more shapes start to come in like stars and more of them start to drop at the same time. So you end up with a situation where you've got three shapes falling. You've only got half a screen to catch them all. You've got to zip your thing back and forth really fast to get two of them down at once and then one of them down.

You can do the Tetris thing, I think, where you press the button to, like, release them faster when you've got them out in the... It's good. I recommend it on the spectrum. It's a little bit... I did not enjoy Dizzy Panic as much, I have to say. I thought it was quite boring,

but I didn't enjoy it for long enough for it to get difficult, so maybe that's why... It took me a long time to get round to playing it, and, like, playing it properly and really giving it the time of day. And that's despite the fact that it and Quick Snacks, I actually bought as separate releases. They're the only dizzies I bought. not in collections.

So I actually ended up with two copies of both of those. So you'd think. Perhaps interestingly enough, there's another game called Panic Dizzy, the other way around. I know. And it doesn't matter. Yeah. And it's on the game gear and it's poor. It's part of the excellent collection. I'm going to have to trust you that that is

the way around they are. Like, I don't know which is which. One of those Panic Dizzy Dizzy. Dizzy is the one that you like and Panic Dizzy is the one that no one likes. It is an extremely weak falling block puzzle game on the Game Gear as part of the excellent Dizzy Collection, which scarcely came out. I think they printed 500 copies and then... I've... Yes, I've

never seen it in the wild in my life. I have. I saw it once in Children's World, but never thought it. Oh, goodness. So Children's World, why don't I think to look there? I know. God, that's taking me back to remember children's world. Good Lord. This is such a trip. Bubble Dizzy also came out in 1990.

Now, Bubble Dizzy is vaguely interesting, and I'm going to very briefly explain why. It's a game where Dizzy is at the bottom of the ocean. Lots of bubbles are rising up randomly, different shapes and sizes. You have to stand on them to ascend to the surface. Well, different sizes, yes, not really different sizes, yes, not really different shapes. Different speeds and sizes. Yeah, speeds and sizes, that's correct.

Now, the frustration comes to the fact that they do seem to be random. You are timed because he does have an air bar. Now, it's not that difficult if you just don't freak out. It's quite easy. there are I believe dangerous fish swimming around as well you have to try and avoid Let me tell you about a game problem from those days Which I call New Zealand Storying

To New Zealand Story is where You are at the top of a shaft That has alternating platforms down it So you've got a platform on the left Further down a platform on the right But like a zip And you fall at the top of that thing Your natural gaming urge

is to steer towards one of the platforms, but the speed at which you move in the air when you do this does not get you on the platform. And so you correct it by heading for the other platform. And in this manner, you snake your way down the entire shaft missing every single platform because you are panicking. That essence was turned into a game

and that game is Bubble Dizzy. Now, the only interesting thing to me about Bubble Dizzy is the fact that the Bubble Dizzy was used again in Fantastic Dizzy as one of the mini-game. But it was also used as the first level of Linus Spacehead. Oh, really? The first level of Vinus Spacehead is simply just Bubble Dizzy again. And that leads me to believe that the Spacehead series does share some DNA with Dizzy, which therefore makes it interesting.

Because Cosmic Space Head is an awesome game, and I'll get to talking about it on here one of these days. Cosmic Spacehead rules. What a game. It's like an evolution of Dizzy almost, you know, but we'll get to it someday. I'll get, I'll get you on here for Cosmic Spacehead. Oh, yeah. Two hours of Cosmic Spacehead. Yes, please.

So Bubble Dizzy, we're giving that short shrift because we need to move on to Spellbound Dizzy. Yes, we do. Is that what comes next? It's not Yoke folk that comes next. I believe that was after Spellbound Dizzy because... It's a shame, because... Yoke folk was made to fill up a collection, I believe, a compilation. That's right, the second compilation.

But we'll do Spellbound first. We will do Spellbound first. It's a shame because like how Abbey Road didn't come out last but ends in the best way that the whole Beatles' albums catalogue could end. It's similar with how like Yokefolk should really be before Spellbound but wasn't. Spellbound, I remember, this was the point of which I'd jumped on the dizzy wagon now, mind cart, and I was aware of them coming out. So I was there for the buildup to Spellbound Dizzy

and I was reading previews of it in the Specky magazines and so on. And it just looked flipping phenomenal. It was going to be so much bigger than any other Spectrum game. Sorry, I meant to say Dizzy game, but probably Spectrum game that I'd played. Like, it was going to be gigantic

in a way that felt daunting and like, it sounds. It sounded as if it was going to be too big. Impossible. Yeah. And it was going to... How many screens? Like 150 screens or something? Yeah, I think so. A number of screens, yeah.

And it was going to have new animations. Because, like, with Fantasy World Dizzy, the formula was really, like, perfected. But Dizzy had never had a frame of new animation since Dizzy won. In fact, he'd lost some. The death animations were gone now. Oh, except for him bobbing on the surface of water. That was his only death animation. Yeah.

now there were going to be these new frames of animation, which kind of revivified the idea of him as a cartoon star on your computer. And it delivered on that. There was, he could eat food now. He could eat fruit and you could see him chewing. If he fell a great distance, now he would get little stars around his head and sit on the floor for a moment. Stuff like that.

I think that's it. Yeah, yeah. Well, it adds a character, doesn't it? I mean, and that was stuff that was brought forward into Fantastic Disney as well. And I believe Yokefolk, but Spellbound Izzy is not one I'm personally that familiar with. It's probably the one I'm least familiar with in the whole series because I was not able to play it. I didn't have it. Well, so when...

My understanding is that it's not thought of very fondly. Is that right? Yeah. Well, when it came out with all of this fanfare and excitement surrounding it, I do remember that it kind of didn't sync up with like when... Like, you know, I didn't have a birthday coming up or anything like that. And we went to town, we went to Loughborough one day, and we looked in boots, popular high street chemist, but which in those days sold electronics and games and things as well. And there they had it, the second Dizzy collection, the blue box set, Dizzy's excellent, not excellent, excellent adventures, don't know why, put the G's in there, guys, what are you doing? And it, for some reason, they chose the cover of Dizzy Down the Rapids for the main illustration. I'm looking at it right now with great fondness.

Yeah, oh, by the way, Dizzy knowing fans who are jumping up and down and shouting, we're going to say the thing you want us to say about Bubble Dizzy and Dizzy down the rapids in a bit. Don't worry. But this had Spellbound on it, and it had Prince of the Oak Folk, the exclusive to this pack game. Yes. And I pitched a proper, full-on tantrum because I couldn't have it. I didn't, you know, I hadn't saved up.

pocket money. Um, mom wouldn't just buy it for me. It was like 10 pounds. You understand. That's ridiculous amount of money. Yeah. And so I couldn't cope with how much I needed this thing and wasn't allowed it. And so what I had to do was like, just, I had to just walk away from them. So mum patiently sat on the bench in the middle of Carrion Court or whatever it was called. Just waiting for me while I just stood with my arms folded, fuming and steaming, leaning against a wall, just outside like just so just so angry i couldn't have this dizzy we we quickly struck up a bargain though um basically i was allowed to have this this thing if i could save up enough points with my teacher which is to say that every time i was remarkably good presumably for an entire day because i was

I was what my teacher referred to as a naughty boy and which I referred to as a boy who genuinely didn't understand why these teachers kept up this idea that if they said be quiet, then we would. Like it just didn't, I was like, so hang on, you're telling me

that you're putting me in a room with all my friends and you think I'll be quiet. Like, that's not under my control. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Genuinely, I didn't mean to be a naughty boy. The premise is deeply flawed. Yeah, I just, I couldn't shut up. Well, so if I could, if I could be a very good...

Also, this may have been by the time I had the teacher who, looking back, was not nice to her children and was a bad teacher. So anyway, whatever. But if I could get 10 pegs, which were these little plastic things that stacked, essentially, these little play things, then I could have... the Dizzy excellent collection. And you bet, you betcha, I built up those 10 pegs and I got that Dizzy collection eventually. And, yeah, Spellbound Dizzy absolutely lived up to the hype. And then you were never good again. Frankly, no. It lived up to the hype. It was incredible. It was just too big. It was cavernous. And that is almost a joke because it was set in these caverns. It was set underground. I looked it up. It was 105 screens, which is still.

still insane. And it also says here that you can only carry two items in this one. Is that right? I'd forgotten that. That's an absurdly assert change, but do go on, sorry. Yes, it is. It makes sense because there is a puzzle where you have to collect three rocks, much like in Fantasy World Dizzy, where there was a puzzle where to raise. We referred to it, but didn't say what it was. There was a broken bridge. The middle of the bridge was on the water, and you had to put rocks in the water to raise the water level so that you could hop across. Totally logical. So this is one of those things, like the whip in Daisy's room. room.

Yeah. The looking back, I guess, was them, it was Big Red being funny. Because the game was built around the windy shaft, which was a deep hole into the earth. And it's a big hole in the earth. And it was windy. And you could see these little particle effects coming up out of it. And you would just bob along on the surface of it, unless you had a boulder in your pocket. If you were carrying a boulder, then you could go down a level.

If you were carrying two boulders, you could go down. two levels. And I think, now that I think about it, I think it was one of the dizzy games where you could probably pick up a bag that would then allow you to carry three or four items. And then you, now you could carry three boulders and get down another level. And it was amazing how much was going on. Like if you got, you know, because everything is all earth and caves and rocks and weird crystal flowers and things. And then you go down a level and now it's caves with all crystals growing in them. And that's where the Good Wizard Theodore is hiding, who's been depicted in the inlays of these games for ages. Those good drawings that I talked about that were just reproduced in

sort of black and white photocopy in the Dizzy Collection. They were full color on the inlay to Magicland Dizzy, if you bought it as a separate game. And it had characters on there. Maybe this was a re-release, because it had Theodore, it had Pogie the Fluffel. These characters did not appear until the second box set. So I don't know. what was going on there. But, yeah, Theodore is down there, it is cave. And then the further down you get, now you're in, like, the bowels of the earth, except they're all, like, mechanical.

Someone's built a factory down there, and there's pistons going off, and it's all metal. Fascinating. There was a really cool set piece where you go on a mine cart ride that goes along the track, and then if you've set it up properly, you know, if you've taken the brakes off and applied this and that, you'll jump over the gap, and it's this cut scene, They, you know, there weren't cut scenes in Dizzy, but there was now of him flying over this gap.

That's desperately exciting, yes. Landing on the track on the other side, it flipping was. And to understand there was an Indiana Jones film around the time that had a similar scene. See, that reminds me of Fantastic Dizzy's Mind Cart, which is the worst thing in the world. Yes, it's not great, is it? It's toilet design.

Toilet Disney. See, now, I think after this podcast, I think I'm going to have to go ahead and throw on the old spellbound dizzy and give it the old college try. I'll tell you what it had. on the spectrum, an absolutely immense piece of music by good old Alistair Brimble of Super Frog. Presumably on 128K spectrum only, though, I would have thought. What are you doing, play?

It's 1991, man. I had a plus two. I was all right. Yeah, exactly. Me too, you're fine. Exactly. On 28K spectrum, who's playing 48K? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think I had that many 128 games. I just had a lot of head over heels, really. And, yeah. But no, so Spellbound Dizzy then, a very big Dizzy, a very silly big Dizzy, quite frankly. Very big egg. And it had... The only way that I was able to really take this in was that it had the biggest and the best cheat mode of any Dizzy game.

If you typed, I want an omelet on the title screen. Yes. I think you had to... I think it was spelled wrong. I think you had to spell it with an E in the middle, omelette. like an American word. I mean, there's already there's an E in it anyway.

Look, never mind. If you typed, I want an omelette. Now... Retin what's listeners, if you know how to spell omelette, please write him. Yes, go on. But don't write into Spellbound Dizzy.

If you don't know how to spell omelette, then write into Spellbound Dizzy, I want an omelette. And what will happen is you unlock total mastery of the game. Not only can you spawn

any item whenever you want and wherever you want, but you can flick between the screens wherever and wherever you want and you can just go through them and just explore the map without having to solve any puzzles and what this did, what this created

was you were able to like see the depth, the breadth of this incredible map it was impenetrably complex I never understood what some of the places that I saw were and how you would properly get to them never figured out how to play through this thing

and in fact there's even one and this is cheeky The game did famously have 105 screens. Two of them were the title screen, I believe. You could go there and be in the title screen, drop items in the title screen, and then reset the game. And there the items would be, just in the title screen. It's very exciting. That's terribly exciting, yeah.

And then the last screen was just an inaccessible circular cavern with no entrances or exits that you could only get to with this cheat mode. And all it had in it was a scroll in the middle of the screen, which when you clicked it said, oh, you found the cheat mode. Welcome to the 105th screen. Graphics were big. Now, worth mentioning that by this time, the games have started to come out in 16-bit. You've got Amiga now, and the Amiga versions of the games varied in quality.

There was no 16-bit original Dizzy. Treasure Island Dizzy was lovely on the Amiga. It was presumably based on the, usually with the Amiga games, they were based on the, I don't know, the Amstrad release. Yeah, yeah. So I'm guessing that they were already. already like this on those systems, but the Treasure Island Dizzy one,

very, very cartoon-y, and it had a very famous tune in it, and it was just lovely. Then Fantasy World Dizzy came out, and they really went to town on that thing. It's a really good version, yeah. Yeah. That's the one I'm... Well, the version of Fantasy World

I'm most familiar with is the PZ version, which I believe is based directly on the Amiga version. Dizzy's got a hat. Yes, he's the full Dizzy model. He's got his pithelmit, He's got his boxing gloves. He's not just a little oval with a smiley face on it and little circles coming up it now. He is like a drawing of dizzy.

He looks like dizzy. The only bad thing about it is when you die, he does die in quite a violent way. Like he's frozen. The yoke comes out and it's really a bit much. There's a few ways. If you die of flaming torch, then out comes a fried egg. It's brilliant. Perfect.

Of course it does. I love it. It's so good. And it all just looks really. plush and like, you know, they really, it was from that era of Amiga games where they were trying to make things look atmospheric and it had extra hidden bits where you could, that weren't in the other versions where you could find like just jewels to pick up just because, yeah, it's a game, here's some stuff. It was lovely. Magicland, Dizzy, back to the Treasure Island style

cartoony look, but it was great. And then Spellbound Dizzy wasn't great. It felt like a step down. it was the only time in 16-bit that Dizzy had had the necessary on the spectrum and on the 8-bit black eyes because you see, Dizzy being an egg, he had to be white and the sprite, you could only have

one colour on a spectrum sprite. On the Amstrad, I think it was, they actually shaded him. He had shading round the corner of, you know, the bottom side of him. But it was green, it was bright green.

So a little gay had masts growing on him. It was off-putting, and I don't like it. Yeah, I'm out of day, egg dizzy. He was usually white, and because the sprite was too small for them to do a full outline at that low resolution around his eyes, he simply had black eyes with white pupils. And the thing is, you just accepted it because it was a spectrum. It was fine. You were used to that.

It was normal. But on the Amiga, he had white eyes except, you know, in Spellbound Dizzy, where he had the black eyes. And it was like, oh, why? That's a step down then. and the music wasn't nearly as good as it was in the Spectrum version and same is true of you know I've listed the other versions on the other the Spectrum one is the best one sure does he always felt Spectrum native he really did yeah agreed he's a Spectrum boy he's a specky man

now now I think yes thank you now I'm going to expediate yes that's remaining games because we are actually running along the only thing is Prince of the Oak Folk from 19 91. It's actually my favorite one. It's the best one. It's the secret best one. It's the only Dizzy game that I would say to someone without any caveats. Yeah, go and play it. It's great.

Yeah. Definitely. When you say that to any when you say that about any other game, you have to add something you have to say, except for this thing. Like, look out for this bit. But Dizzy, Fringe, the Oak Folk is a tight 40 or 50 screens. Baby's first Dizzy, essentially. It isn't easy, but it is the easiest one by some distance.

Yep. The puzzles are almost all logical as well. And it has another fantasy world style tutorial at the start, so that's good. Almost exactly the same. More or less, yeah. And when I was a child, this is very puerile, so I apologize in advance. This was my favourite because due to the sound card I had, the music sounded like farting bottoms.

Oh, farting bottoms. That does make it the best. Oh, that was good. And I was like, ha ha, ha, asses, because I was a child. The music is the only caveat. The Amiga music. See, I basically only know the Spectrum of Amiga versions of everything. The Amiga music is great, but doesn't play well with the coding.

So a little way into it, the drums sort of invert to the point where on the Amiga, a lot of the time, you would put the sound of, because it was all sample-based music, you would put the sound, and then you would put an echo, which is the sound again, but quieter. So the drums are like, do itch, djjj like that. And they invert.

So it starts to be like that the offbeat is happening at the wrong time. It's disgusting and it's awful. I ripped the tune and played it on Workbench. Great. Didn't do it then.

So it was just in the game that it didn't run. That's very strange. Play it on the Spectrum. The Spectrum version has a wonderful piece of chip folk that's just one of the best tunes

anyone would have to come up with. You can also play this on the NES as Disney the Adventurer. Now, normally I would recommend against that, but it's actually a pretty solid version. Is it? Okay. Now, I believe there's one puzzle change, which is to remove the randomness of the use of the flying carpet. Because in the original game, I believe the flying carpet is the only thing that makes no sense, you just have to use it on some random cloud with no inclination.

I can't even remember what it is. You use it on a cloud, and then it flies you up to the pearly gates, I believe. Yes, and you end up in heaven. And which, yeah, now, in the NEDs version, that's not necessary because that's stupid. They changed it. So you can get there another way. There's also recently released a, I'm not sure if it's homebooter or if it's based on a version that got cancelled. But a megadrive version of Disney Aventra has been ported to the PC.

I think it is, I think it's a thing. Originally it was, originally it was $20, which I paid. And then about four days afterwards, they made it free. And I was like, you know what? You know what? You can have that one. You can have my $20. You've earned it.

This was good work. Yeah, they made it free, thanks to the donations of the early adopters like yourself. Yes, but it's very good. It's a very good way of playing the game. And it comes with some new challenge modes and stuff like speed runs and like a randomized mode

where all the items get shuffled and stuff like that. Oh, wow. It's very impressive stuff, yeah. In fact, we'll wrap up, not wrap up, but we'll summarize, I think. Dizzy has an incredibly committed fan base of people who love Disney and create new games using this Dizzy Age, I think it's called, which is like an engine specifically made to help you make fan-made Dizzy games.

Yeah. And there's a reason why there are so many Kickstarter for new Dizzy games and things like that because people want this guy back. Okay, post prince of the oak folk, you have dizzed down the rapids, another quite throwaway arcade game. You've got fantastic Dizzy, which we've talked about, but I want to briefly explain is

it was designed for consoles, I believe, because it is essentially a greatest hits of Dizzy. Yeah, sort of. But it's also, in my opinion, way too sprawling. Yeah, it's too big. It's not just that it's bad,

it's not that it's bad to design so much, but it's getting from A to B really is just too much of a fath, I think. Way too much, because they bring back the roving rats on the floor and things that kill you. So it's so hard to get about the place, and it's just too big. You do have, you can get extra lives, but they're very scarce, and you have a health bar that you can heal. So it's also one of the friendly or dizzy games, but it's also, like the, I mean, this is a game that you do, there's no password, there's no battery backup. You can play it with safe states now if you're a massive criminal.

Yeah. That's a joke, obviously, emulate the hell out of it. but I still honestly if you're going to play a Dizzy game I really wouldn't recommend this one because you're going to think oh it's just a bit much you know

We yoke folk A Yoke folk The Yoke folk Let me rattle through this as quick as I can Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy was made on the NES Around about the sort of Magicland Dizzy time It was then turned into Fantastic Dizzy

for things like Mega Driver Oh that's how it went down Okay sorry I genuinely didn't realize yeah Yeah because it was on the Nes first wasn't it There's more there's more during the development of the NES version which really was meant to be

a kind of best of here of various Dizzy games stuck together. You're back to cows and cowpats and beanstalks, that sort of stuff. But kind of on the Mega Drive, the 16 bit version was more of its own game sort of, but here's the thing. Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy on the

NES, that is what these throwaway arcade games were developed for. Dizzy down the rapids, bubble dizzy. These were allegedly bits of fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, that they then decided to just release as standalone games. Now, I've seen, I've seen various different claims that it's both of the ways round, and I haven't been able to pick it apart to know exactly which one it is.

But I think it's that they basically were just sharing ideas, and then the spin-off versions actually came out first, I think, but maybe they originated in talking about, so that was that. I'm glad that the Minecraft mini game didn't get in a separate game, because that was truly god-awful stuff. wasn't great. Do we reach the Crystal Kingdom now? We do. We reach the finale. Well, sort of the finale. The original

finale. Pretty much. Prior to them uncancelling it because of strong DVD sales and moving it to Comedy Central. Ha ha ha ha. Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. Dizzy Goes Hollywood. Not really, but kinder. No, they rejected Dizzy Goes Hollywood.

I'll tell you about that in a minute. Oh, wow. That was a real thing. Okay. I have accidentally done something very clever there. Very, very clever. Yeah, this was, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy was where they went. All right, we are by now completely embroiled in attempting to break America. We've noticed that consoles are going to be the next thing. We're drifting a little bit off the true essence of Dizzy.

It's starting to crumble. Let's make a big Swan Song Dizzy game. And this time, let's release it on as many different formats as we can possibly. do, and they'll be different on the different formats. It won't just be a game that gets ported. We'll really play to the strength of the different platforms. So they gave it to all these different people. So what we get is two main versions of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. There's the one I had, which was on the spectrum. This game was the first time a Dizzy game had been more than four pounds ever. It was 999. It was 10. The price of an entire Dizzy collection. I got it

for Christmas or a birthday or whatever I got it for and it was it came in a box not a tape box like a little cardboard box first time that had ever happened it was a plush thing it had a poster oh it's gorgeous the box art is spectacular and I love it

you had stickers the box art was of dizzy swinging on a vine but originally he had a tattoo on his arm and they decided to get rid of that for the actual release but you can still see it on the pre-release advertisements Very good. Tattoo of a tiger's head on his arm. This, unfortunately, was bullsie bobs.

It was bobsy balls. It was not good at all. You can say they laid an egg with this one. Hey! The closest, here is an apt comparison, because we've already compared Dizzy's physics to Sonics. Obviously, Sonics are the superior. Crystal Kingdom Dizzy was to Dizzy as Sonic

Four was for Sonic. Yeah. Yes, ostensibly to look at, if you don't know what you're really talking about, you could say that it's about the same thing. Oh, and I just remembered you say that, don't you see? That's your opinion of Sonic 4. Your wrong opinion of Sonic 4 is that actually it's kind of fine. Well, the thing that I object to... You break the physics in Sonic 4 if you try to break the physics. Like, if you think I'm going to break this game, then you'll break it. If you You should play a normal game, like a normal human being with feelings and a mind, and it's fine. Well, Christopher King and Dizzy, if you jump sideways, you don't tumble so it can F off as far as I'm concerned. They completely screwed up the jumping.

Dizzy, hit, if you jump left, Dizzy Somersault's left. If you jump right, Dizzy Somersault's right. And if you jump without holding a button, as you have to, as I said earlier in the clouds, Dizzy will face the camera and do an upward jump. They didn't include that animation in this game. So now, if you don't hold a key, and press jump, he turns to a side while in the air. It's disgusting. It is disgusting. That makes me feel sick. It's revolting. And he does too many jump, he does too many turns in the air. So it's

like, it's like a dodgy fan game. It doesn't, it all the jumping was wrong. The music was brilliant. No doubt the game was pretty good itself. It was a big sprawling dizzy again. In fact, it had four distinct like chapters to it. The problem is that it was just done, it was done by somebody else. And it was a perfectly good and competent game, but it looked all different and it felt all different. And it was not the 10 pounds of Dizzy that we wanted, except over on the Amiga, where it was a flipping brilliant Dizzy. I found this out years later, or I was a child, so probably a year later. In that one, it was all cartoony. It was like, it was like up a notch from normal Dizzy. You could go into your mate's houses, chat to them. They all had these little

animations going on. So, like, in the Spectrum version, Daisy's just standing outside her house, the standard frozen Daisy. Actually, no, normally they had two frame animations, the Oak Folk. I think she was stood still because they only had one picture of her for this game. Another reason it felt weird. Maybe I'm wrong about that. On the Amiga, she had a completely new bespoke animation of her sitting in a chair playing on a games console. It was brilliant. The whole thing was like that. You had these conversations going on between them where you'd see their faces appear in the little boxes, which was new, and it had these four chapters. All versions had a bit, oh, the general overall premise of it was that you had to bring together these treasures, the lost treasures

of the oak folk. There was a sword, a chalice, and a crown, which are what was in nightmare at the time, you may remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The things that you chose to decide what quest you went on. So I guess the people of Big Red had been watching that. For the Americans, nightmare was the best TV show ever made. Ever made. You can watch it. It's all on YouTube, go and watch it. It was about a fellow named, what is it, Trigard? It's been a long time. Yeah, Craigard.

You've had kids come in. You've had kids come in. They'd wear like a sort of a helmet, like a VR helmet ostensibly, but it wasn't. It was the opposite of a VR helmet. It was just a big hat that covered your eyes up. Yeah. And they projected a game around it sort of.

So the kids, one of these kids were gone on the venture in weird, computers generated, uncanny Valley, nightmare, scary, fighting, fighting fantasy world, while the other kids said things like sidestep left, up, up, forward left. Yeah. And it gave us one of the funniest.

Go on YouTube right now, pause to the podcast and type, Simon, sidesteped your left. And watch the video. It's the funniest thing ever. It's really good. Yeah. In the either third or fourth chapter

of Crystal Kingdom, Dizzy, you find out why it's called Crystal Kingdom. It's because there's a crystal you have to get. And there's a man called Richard. who is urging you on to get you through the crystal maze to find the crystal. Oh, my God. Dizzy, dizzy, dizzy, dizzy, dizzy was brilliant. Americans look up the crystal maze and just learn some culture while you're at it.

We shouldn't have to inform you of all this stuff. Have you watched Games Master yet? On you get. Oh, beautiful. I'll watch Flippin' Bill Nye, the science guy, if you're... You know what? I just finished watching all of Breaking Bad. So you now owe me to watch the Crystal Maze, okay?

You'll love it. It's really good. I'm not saying it was bad. It was good. You know him. He's from Rocky Horror. You know him. You know him.

You'll like it. You know, old man. All fellow. That was the final Crystal Kingdom game. What's interesting, and what will segue to our actual, actual, final actual bit, is that several years later, as in not long ago, maybe 2017, somewhere around there, we had reached the point where people are still doing demo scene stuff on the spectrum, right? They're still fiddling about at the very borders and edges of what the ZDX spectrum

can natively do. Yes. And some of those people, some Russians, I think, that generally it's Russians who like fiddling about with ZX spectrums, and they've made, there are loads of dizzy fan games in Russian. Just load. Yes, there are, yeah, yeah. And by far the best, like, people at that that I've ever seen decided,

yes, we agree with Dave, even though we've never heard of him, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy on the Spectrum Bad, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy on the Amiga, good. So they co-ed, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy on the Amiga, on the Amiga on the spectrum. Beautiful. I was going to ask if someone had done that because it seemed like such a no-brainer.

But not only did they do that, they basically like remixed the original Spectrum music, which was really good, but sort of with their tricks that they know now. So it was more technically impressive, although I prefer the originals, the music. Yeah, yeah.

The Dizzy was really good. And they spruced up the graphics. Those guys can get, they can do magic now, so they can have like, the spectrum was made out of big sprites of one color with a great big square of color behind them. That's where color clash came from.

If you walked Dizzy in front of a green bush, Dizzy would turn green and we did not care or notice because that was normal on the spectrum. That was the goddamn aesthetic, okay? It was right. These guys, not only can these guys make it so that Dizzy doesn't change color when he walks in front of a hedge,

but they can make that hedge have different colored flowers growing out of it. They can do stuff that couldn't be done in the old days. And with no extra gubbins, they're not cheating. It's all stuff Spectrums can do natively if you've had 30 years of messing about with it and figuring it out. So they made this version of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, which you can go and download anytime you like, it's so good. It was so good, in fact, that the Oliver Twins hired them to make the new Dizzy game in what 2020 was it? Yeah, for the ZX Spectrum next. For the ZDX spectrum next

And importantly The ZX spectrum You can just load it on one And it will run on a real spectrum I did not know that I thought it was exclusive to the next That's very interesting It was made for the next

It was like a stretch goal For the next Because they The Oliver, what happened was The Oliver Twins looked at the spectrum next Got all excited about it And said, hey, because they're nice guys Yes, they're lovely

If you reach a stretch goal That's really like big And enough to finance it We can make a new Disney game And then they went, oh, oh, what have we said? We've actually got to make a new Dizzy game now. Oh, no. And they did, what they made?

Well, here's the thing, right? When we say a new Dizzy game, a lot of the time, the assumption is that it's not really new. It's going to be like Wonderland, Disney or Mystery World Dizzy. Like, it's an old game that they've re-released. This is a new, like, Dizzy game. This is straight up, like, new screens, new puzzles, new action, new graphics, all new. This is totally fresh.

And it rules. It's amazing. Dave, please tell the people about how good, wonderful Dizzy is. Thank you. What they made is the Sonic Mania of Dizzy. Yes. And it fits it so in so many ways because it's the old physics is back. Yeah. It looks and sounds about right.

And yes, Sonic Mania, you know, with a bit of time, you can see that there are some flaws in it that I certainly didn't notice when it came out. But Wonderland Dizzy, the new Dizzy game, made with the Christian Whitehead. and friends of Dizzy, basically, because same story. They've been making the best Sonic fan games. These guys made the best Dizzy one, so new game. But it's a real one.

Like, if Sonic Mania had been project led by Eugene Naka himself, that's what this is. The Oliver Twins designed this game, the way they designed Fantasy World Dizzy. On paper, I think. Like, I think they did it in the exact way that they used to. Gave it to these programmers, and these programmers

put together something remarkable. It's amazing what they've When the Oliver Twins were at the museum that I saw the map, they brought the original map for Fantasy World Dizzy, laid out on a big table. Very cool

to see that, all pencil drawn graph paper, very cool, like annotated, I wish I could get like two hours with it, you know. The shroud. The shroud, of the shroud of Dizzy, yeah. Oh, I'd love to see that. And I'm saying, and again, of course I'm looking at it, I'm thinking, like,

I could fight any of these nerds, so I could take this, like this. I could take any of these people all at once, they could brush me, I'd be like, oh boy. Yeah. And me, with the original source code for Dizzy, like, tucked into my belt, the original map for Fantasy World Dizzy's screwed up and shoved into my wallet. That's almost certainly true, isn't it?

Because it's not, nobody who's going to be there is, like, either under the age of 40 or in any kind of, they will be in trough physical condition. And I'm saying that, I'm like, okay, I'm six, seven. I weigh a million stone. That, surely that's enough. Like, I could just barrel through these people. Yeah, just to a big roly-poly.

It's the way Disney would want it. It's funny the hedgehog's going to attack. Yeah, get in my car. Or even, I think I could probably just intimidate them by shouting, and it would be more than enough. Anyway, that's enough about me fantasizing about stealing the dizzy things, I think. It's more or less enough about dizzy as well. It's more or less enough about dizzy as well.

I mean, Wonderland is the finale. It's the final capper. I haven't finished it, by the way. I played it for a lot of it, and I found it just like the old Dizzy Games, which is to say, I enjoyed every moment of playing it, and there came a point where I didn't know what to do anymore, and I drifted off.

I wanted, I haven't played it yet, and I will play it now that I know you can just play it. I honestly thought you needed a next or next emulator. Oh, no, not only do you need that. I played it on a spectrum emulator, but you can, I think, You can just play it in a browser. It's on Yokefolk.com, and it's meant to be on YokeFote.com.

They're not illegally hosting it. It was meant to be there. The Spectrum Next, I have to add, because this is one of my pet peeves. I have to get it out while I've got the opportunity. You can go and buy a Commonwealth 64 Mini, which is a small Commodore 64 clone thing computer that you plug into your television, like a Megadrove Mini. You can go and buy soon an Amiga Mini, a little H-JMI Amiga Mini, plug into your computer, load it up with Amiga ROMs,

have the best time of your life ever, right? So I'm like, okay, spectrum's got a thriving fan base, really thriving. There's going to be an H-TMI spectrum that I can buy that's not going to be too expensive, and I can load a bunch of specky games onto it, maybe use a USB keyboard or an in-built speckey keyboard even better.

Nope, no such thing. That doesn't exist. So next exists, and it costs like 500 pounds. It's an H-GMI spectrum that costs 500 pounds. Now, here's what I have to say to that. That is not in the spirit of the spectrum. No. I understand that it's a very expensive product to make.

I appreciate that. It's a very niche product. But the spectrum is supposed to be an accessible computer. And the fact that there is no one making a Spectrum mini that's just like a 60-pound HTML USB thing that runs specky rums and has a little specky keyboard is a disgrace as far as I'm concerned. The fact that you can go and buy. Commodore 64 mini, disgusting, sickening, a joke. Nobody in this country wants to play that.

Nobody, everyone wants Pecky, no one wants Commodore 64, no one. I'll tell you what you can get. There is a, basically a, I think it's a Raspberry Pi in a box, but there is a thing you can get called the ZX HD, which is an HDMI output interface for a real spectrum. So you can like plug it onto the back. And that would appear to be 70 euros. But you don't get a spectrum with it.

You have to have one. No, well, I have a spectrum. I still have my spectrum. And it works. Oh, mine doesn't work. My capacity is. Oh, that's a shame. Well, I assume it works.

I've not used it at six years. Maybe it's not working anymore. But, yeah. Nevertheless, so you can... Plugged it into the H-T-TV. It looks amazing. Oh, oh, it looks like you need your own Raspberry Pi to complete the thing. So there's a couple of components you need, but you can get it.

I've got one. I can make it happen. and I've got a Raspberry Pi, easy to do. There you are. I just wanted to express my outrage that this hadn't been leapt upon because the Commonwealth 64, for God's sake, come on.

It's like making a Dragon 32 minie or like a Sam Coupé mini. Nobody cares. I never followed it because there was too much of it and I couldn't understand it, but I remember there were lots of attempts to bring out some sort of spectrum revival

that all happened more or less than... There was a ZX Spectrum Vega, which was almost the exact thing I want. But for some reason, had no H-TMI out, so if they had, it would have been perfect, but no, they absolutely made a complete hash of it. Well, then, it's just

nothing then if it hasn't got H-DMI-A. What's it got, Scott? Yeah, I think so, or RF even, it was rubbish. What's the point of that? It came out well into the H-T, like, yeah, as well. But then also, and I won't say which one, because I don't know which one,

and also because I don't want to do any libels. But I seem to remember that, like, of the various spectrum revivals that were coming out. At least one of them was a scam. The second vigour the handheld, yeah, allegedly. That was very much not good. Right.

But it has reminded me of something that I really ought to mention before we close this, because I'm amazed I haven't mentioned already. Okay, listen lads and ladies and whatever. There is a Evercade cartridge called the Oliver Twins collection. Now, this collects various console-based Oliver Twins games. Most potently, obviously, it has the Nez versions of Treasure Island Dizzy, Fantastic Dizzy, Dizzy, the Adventurer, and the unreleased, or previously unreleased games, Wonderland Dizzy, Mystery World Dizzy, and Dream World Pogi,

which together basically comprise fancy World Dizzy and Magic Land Dizzy. more or less. Yeah. Mystery World Dizzy is Fantasy World Dizzy. You also get Super Robin Hood and some other games that were made all of the Twins. Now, this is a bangor

of a cartridge for the Evercade, which is a banger of a system in general. Now, the reason I raised this so urgently is it's going to go out of print soon. They are stopping doing it. The cartridge or the Evercade? The cartridge. They're not allowed

to make any more of them. Not allowed. Oh, okay. I think they've lost the license or whatever. Now, my... I urge you to buy this cartridge, even if you don't have an ever gate, because you are not going to get these games on physical media any cheaper than this. Like, it's not going to happen. So I really highly recommend that you get it in. For one thing, it's a brilliant cartridge.

The games are wonderful. Dizzy. It's a banger. Get it. The only other way you're going to play these Dizzy games is with piracy because for some reason, they have not. not seem fit to make a big dizzy collection because the world is terrible and hate exists in every corner. It's even difficult to

play them with piracy because World of Spectrum, they're the only games they've had to take down the ROMs of. Because Codemasters said no. I just find that so short-sighted because they're not making any money off this. No, they refuse to. They will not.

We want them to sell them and they won't. Yeah. But they did Prince of the Oak Folk on Android and it was trash. Oh, no good. It was terrible remake of Prince of the Oak Folk on Android, really bad. But they won't just give us a collection of busy games. Mown, moan, winge, winch. Last thing, before I go, I said I was going to tell you about Dizzy Goes to Hollywood. This was a game that the bloke, the Big Red Software bloke, which I think it was like a bloat. Like, I think that was Big Red was the name of his company.

I don't know. But he, anyway, or someone at that company, after making Magicland Dizzy just went, I've made another one. And he just presented this full design for a complete game in which Dizzy was like in the back lot. of a Hollywood studio, and it was pastiches of all Robocop and that. And the Oliver twins liked it. It was good, but they rejected it because Dizzy is about like fairy tale lands and stuff like that. And that is why we have Seymour goes to Hollywood. I was going to say, yeah, that I was going to guess that that was the case using the genius mind. Seymour was a potatoe-looking lumpy blob of guy who came out, you know, towards the end of Dizzy's run,

which was just more dizzy games, but with, you know, a different character. And they were also made by the game. And I liked them. They had a couple of spin-off, you know, puzzlers as well, and I liked one of them. Robot Cup was quite good. And they were...

My story, by the way, about that, is that I was once in Stratford on what was either a school trip or a local church trip. And I can't tell you which, because the two things blended together in my village in the 80s, or the 1991.

once whenever it was. And I remember being in W8 Smiths and just getting this flash of inspiration. I realized, wait a minute, I can afford four pounds. I don't have to wait for birthdays necessarily. I don't have to necessarily have Christmas money. I can, with pocket money that I would normally spend on sweets, I can buy a spectrum game. And the game I want to buy is Seymour. Because I can. These games are out and I can have them. It was like having, It was like the first moment you realize you have your own income or something. I was like, I can just have this. And I did.

I bought Seymour Goes to Hollywood and that that was the last time I ever saw a game for four pounds in my life. That day was the day. I never saw it again. The games were always out of my reach until I was an adult from then on. And today the spiritual successor to Dizzy Horizon Forbidden West was released

for 70 pounds. 70 pounds. That's like, like how Crystal Kingdom Dizzy was £10. It's unacceptably expensive. I cannot buy it and I will not buy it. And it's ridiculous. Also, look out for Dizzy, not spinoffs exactly, but things made by other people. The existence of Dizzy allowed for slightly magic to exist. I won't tell you anything about it because I could go on for hours. It's brilliant. Go and play it on the spectrum. Oh, I didn't know that you were very familiar with slightly magic. That means we have to do a slightly magic episode. Okay. Yes, please. Also, in the modern day, we have well no not in the Monday back then Wibble World Giddy

came out that was a parody of Dizzy huge big hands instead of money or coins instead of Dosh and that made me

laugh in the hood that was a parody of Dizzy it straight up ripped the music like the guy ripped the music

which was the technical term for it from Fantasy World Dizzy had used it in his game and probably the only reason didn't get sued is because he wasn't

selling the game just giving it away on magazine covers. I don't know why they weren't getting in trouble, but they weren't. That was Amiga that one, wasn't it? That was Amiga. Yeah. And then in the quote-unquote modern day, it's probably at least

10 years old or more now, Spud's Quest, you can get that on Steam. I have never played it, because I always intended to stream it at the end of streaming the dizzy games, which I never got around to doing. There's also, there's a game called Mystic Bell, which is quite dizzy-like.

It's dizzy-like, it's slightly magic-like, and it's lovely. Yes. but other than that, there really aren't that many other Dizzy like games, I would say. No, not really. I mean, that's kind of plenty, though, isn't it? There's a fair few of them.

When I was, I always used to fantasize about a dizzy collection on the DS or the 3DS, where you'd have the game on the top screen and the bottom screen, you would select what item you wanted to determine. Oh, that'd be so good. I didn't fantasize about that.

I just had a Spectrum emulator on my home-brewed-up DSI. Yes, I did. I did too, yes, but I mean for the whole accessibility thing, because nowadays, if you were to release a compilation of Disney games, people would defecate in their own trousers out of range at the archaic design when they weren't clever enough and got killed in it. Yeah, they'd be wrong to do that because it would be a problem, but yeah.

Yes, but the idea of a dizzy collection that does actually offer optionally this polish for modern people to get into these cases. I say things like that, but I have no, I'm not saying that it's bad that people want their games not to be nightmarishly hard. That's totally reasonable, right? No, especially out of Dizzy, which is like sweet,

cartoony fairy tale things. Yeah, it is. But in a Dizzy game, like, for example, if you would get hit by that little cage in Treasure Island Dizzy, the idea of having someone go, oh, okay, I want to rewind that, it's reasonable, I would say. Like, fair enough, you've seen the trap,

you've had your laugh, let's get on with the actual game. I think that's totally fair enough. Yes, the games will last you about six minutes, but that's fine. That's fine. And I want to mention one final, final thing is it's important to be chronicled in podcast form.

One final word from Jacques Cousteunk. In the Megadry version of Fantastic Dizzy, you can make it into a Prince-based mode. There is a ridiculous... Oh, yes! It was a ridiculous Easter egg that allows the Prince symbol to appear. And when you pick it up, it begins to rain purple rain.

Yes. You will never find it without using a video or a guide, but it's out there. I just want you to know that Estreg exists, and it's very funny. And that's dizzy, isn't it? Lovely, you're dizzy. That's the British games industry.

We were all just watching Danger Mouse and going, I'll put it in a game and being silly. And it was great 80s. The British games industry in the 80s, I do feel sorry for anyone who didn't experience it. It was magic. It was just a lot of silly schoolboys telling rude jokes to each other.

Yes. And it was majestic and we'll never see us like again. No. Except on Itchio. On a less dour note, I want to thank you, Dave, for coming and lending your dizzy expertise.

And I also want to ask, where can people find you and your work on the internet if they wish to pursue you like some kind of maniac? Yeah. if they want to go down the windy shaft to find me. I am the man from two podcasts that you can find. One of them is called Sonic the Comic, the Podcast.

Did you know listeners that everything you know about Sonic the Hedgehog used to be wrong? They retconned everything. Sonic used to be completely different in his earliest days. And this is chronicled in the UK comic, Sonic the Comic. Not the American Archie comic. They made up their own thing there. And we won't currently hold that against them. We do that enough in the podcast.

Sonic the Comic the podcast. myself and Chris McFeeley off of YouTube Transformers the Basics have a podcast where we go through issue by issue and we tell you about the advert we don't just go like oh here's the arc of the story no we're not interested in that we're giving you the adverts the letters page the game reviews of the time the game's news of the time we are splicing in

TV ads that happened at the time to give you a full immersive experience of what it was like to live in that time be a school child in 1993 through whatever we will take you there and you will love it. It's extremely good. You'll find out all about Dr. Kintabor.

Thank you. It is. It's extremely good and I wouldn't say that. If I hated it, I would say to your face, your podcast is trash. It's not. It's very good. And he's not,

he hasn't got anything to sell because we haven't got round to having him on yet. We will. Come on. Come on whenever you like, but we haven't done yet. I'd love to.

Thank you. That is a self-lood. I'd love to. I hate Sonic, but I will do it anyway. Yeah, sure. And then Serious Disney is my other podcast, where we actually, for reasons known only to ourselves a few years ago and forgotten sins, take seriously almost as pieces of art to be examined. Those Disney remakes, live action

remakes that they keep doing, it's very strange. Also, we just have silly episodes where we muck about. Also, we talk about Disney Plus. There's like six episodes that are just a deep dive into Frozen, and they're like, worth listening to, if you can believe that. Serious, Disney, Sonic the Comic, the podcast. Otherwise, you can find. me on Twitter and YouTube. I used to have quite a storied YouTube. I suppose I still have quite a storied YouTube career, even if I've been doing podcasts recently and so I haven't done any videos for a while. Over on YouTube and Twitter, I am called Demon Tomato Dave. You can find me that. Some of you might remember me. I was in a couple of rental floss songs, the Mario land

one, the Ocarina of Time lyrics one. That's me doing a cappella. You did not Roy. You did not Roy. I did not Roy, and I did theme from the dark world. And if you want to hear, listen, if you want to hear, if you're one of the few people in the world who remembers the theme from the dark world and he thought it was good and he'd like to hear it as a fully expanded song but done now by someone who has skills instead of then by someone who just has a built-in wery mic next to a fan that sounds horrible and scratchy i'm afraid you have to go on my patreon which is demon to arto dave and i'll give it to you for like it's like ten dollars it's nothing it's it might even be less than that i've got the songs

there's one of the swimming music off mario sixty four and it's like actively kind of beautiful i um i want to i want to recommend your take on the doctor who theme which is on your YouTube. Oh, yeah. Dr. Huacabella. Very good. Very good. Dave, very good in general. Okay, that's enough. Stop plugging your stuff now. Thank you. Okay. Retronauts, Patreon, indeed. We also have one.

You don't get any songs, but I'll look into that. I'll talk to Jeremy about doing some kind of song with him. We love games. They're real good. I can't think of any more right now. $5 a month, that's nothing. That's literally nothing. That's less than a sandwich. You don't need another sandwich. I mean, I certainly don't.

Look at me. $5 a month, two full-length, Patreon-exclusive episodes, full-length. People who aren't on the Patreon, they can't listen to these episodes. You'll go to them, oh, did you hear that brilliant Retronauts episode about dokey-ducky Major Ship Island or whatever?

And they'd be like, oh, no, I didn't. It didn't show up on my feed. You know, like, oh, yeah, forgot. You're not a subscriber. Oh, dear. dear oh dear Jesus and then you

you know completely like exclude them from your friend group forever for being such a loser and he pushed them over do you want to be excluded

no you don't so five dollars per month two full length Patreon exclusers episodes oh my God also you'll hear every weekly episode early

early access you can hear it before all your nerd friends who won't be hearing it you'll get mini podcasts and write-ups journalism even

by Diamond Fight absolute genius. They're brilliant. They are informative. They are funny. They are cleverly written. And you know what? They're quite emotional sometimes too. Very good. And there's even, in fact, this is very exciting. There's a tier called Ultra 64, which lets you choose the topic of a retronauts episode. Oh my God. We can talk about something you want to hear. And there's only one space left. It's open right now. So if you get in there, you know, you can force us to do an episode about something stupid that you like, something rubbish. So go for it. Get it done. That's the Retronauts Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash Retronauts. It's excellent. I've been Stuart Jip.

That was Dave Balmer. We'll probably return on the future to rambling you about even more old British microcomputer games. Yes. Hooray! I don't know how to end podcast. Hooray!

The and I'maherty, and so much the other than the way. And so, I think, and so the other, but I'm going to be. But, and so-bye-but-a-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Oh!