Game:

Crystal Kingdom Dizzy (1992)

Duration: 10:13

1,733 views

8

And here's the Atari ST version! As usual, it plays almost identically to the Commodore Amiga version. Most of the differences are superficial: The colors and sounds are a little different, text is decorated a little differently, there's no gradient on the sky, and the status bar had to be trimmed down to a thin black strip. At least it kept the score display this time! Also, level 4 is missing a bat and a couple of moving spikes, which probably has something to do with avoiding the slowdown I experience later on.

The music is also completely different, except for the title song, which sounds identical to the Amiga version's. (How did they pull that off?) Now, I cheated a little in making this: You can't actually play with music and sound effects at the same time. But since I wanted to show off both, I played in sound effects mode, then recorded the level music and mixed it into the videos I made. Video games are just cooler with both music and noises, you know!

Since I didn't want this to be just a retread of Pancho21's longplay, I decided to be VERY thorough and reveal every dialog box I could find in the game. And in these upgraded versions, many messages are chosen randomly out of a small set of possible messages to add variety--basically, the game's writers wanted to think of lots of funny ways to tell you you're doing the wrong thing. So I had to keep trying the same thing until I saw every message, which can take a while and makes Dizzy look obsessive-compulsive, but at least you'll get the "full story" this way!

It would have been nicer if someone had made a text dump of the game though, since I'm never sure if I've tried every sequence or combination of object uses that could trigger some obscure message. For example, I didn't know the first conversation with the genie existed until I had already tried recording this level a few times. You have to be standing at the base of the well--even though you can be standing on top of the well to throw something in--and you need to have never picked up the coin or the diamond yet, so it will make sense that Dizzy hasn't seen anything valuable enough yet.

What made recording this more annoying than the Commodore 64 version was the emulator I have doesn't save input files; I'm just recording directly to .Avi as I play. So I had to be careful and play one whole level flawlessly so that the recordings would be seamless. Also, playing while recording video sometimes makes my keyboard lock up for a second, so that was another cause of some little mistakes and hesitations as well as more do-overs than I would have had otherwise.

Since it takes so long to do everything now, each level has been split into 2 parts to get under the current 15 minute limit. I tried to put most of the loading at the end of each level's video, but for this one you'll have to skip to about the 2-minute mark before you see any gameplay, sorry.

I will admit I have no idea how to get passwords for this game.

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