Magicland Dizzy (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
60Magicland Dizzy is a platform puzzler which was designed by The Oliver Twins and produced by Big Red Software for the Spectrum and Amstrad in 1991. The Amiga conversion was handled by Codemasters, and a very nicely drawn update it is. Let's check it out. (See notes below)
Please support the Lemon Amiga Gaming Channel Patreon! :)
https://www.patreon.com/lemontubeamiga
My Sponsors:
1. π₯ Kim Lemon
2. π₯ Sepp
3. π₯ Predseda
4. π₯ Paul Henderson (Loki)
5. π₯ Bloxyman22
6. π₯π₯ Ed Heaton
7. π₯ Eric Johnson
8. π₯ Bernhard Lukas
9. π₯ Ramon Schmitt
10. π₯ Glenn Main
Production Notes:
===============
Captured: 4th Nov, and 7th November 2021
Narrated: 14th September 2022
As this is the end of another year, what would be better than to play a game which marks the 11 years (started 2011) of Lemon Tube Amiga, and the inspiration behind the infamous Cartoon Intro. It's perhaps no surprise that I've been a Dizzy fan for a very long time. A friend introduced me to the original Dizzy back when we both had C64s, and I remember eagerly getting Dizzy 2 and Dizzy 3 when they came out. I was deep into them, and made my own maps, and coloured them in with felt tip pens. Even when I got my first job in 1993, I was a desktop publisher, and when the boss went out to lunch, I used the office colour photocopier to preserve my Dizzy 4 maps. I took photos of those very same maps for this review, and stuck them all together in one big image for the first time. It felt good to finally see them put together, even if the light from the photos made the colours look a bit washed out.
There is just time to mention my Dizzy 3 story. At the time, the games were Β£2.99. But I rang the helpline several times due to getting stuck, and eventually wrote the helpline message down word-for-word. A few months later, my mum got an itemised bill for over Β£70, as the phone calls cost Β£1 per minute, and I'd been on the line for over an hour in total. (The tape looped every 20mins, so you had to wait for it to finish and start again). I paid off that bill over the next few years!
Although I used to be able to complete the Dizzy's in my sleep, coming back to this in 2021 cold made it difficult to get through it. I tried at least 3 times to record a full play, but each time I died. By the fourth time, I saved the game up at key checkpoints, and this mean't some guaranteed progress for the review. I'm not too worried that the end is missing as it means players who want to play this have something to look forward to. The clips at the end of the video were recorded by me at Play Blackpool 2015. I got to meet Andrew Oliver later in that talk, although I spoke mostly a load of gibberish in my fan-crazed state. I also received another Dizzy badge to replace one which I had lost a long ago. Very kind of them.
If you look at the Mobygames web site in the Promo Art section, you'll find the original development notes (and the initial maps) by the Oliver Twins; which they handed over to Codemasters for others to code. A sensible idea, although this mean't Codemasters quickly realised they could brand any game with the little egg and it would sell, so they didn't need the Oliver Twins anymore to make the rest of the series.
Danscore:
The Dizzy series is a strange hang-over fandom crazy from the 8-bit hero days of the late 1980s. The Oliver Twins were celebs of the scene, and their games were often characteristic of being 'cheap and cheerful'. The first Dizzy game never appeared on the Amiga, but we did get almost all of the others. I love Dizzy 2 and 4 the most, as they seem to be the best conversions from the 8-bits. Somehow I didn't really enjoy the later games as much. This one feels like a 20 minute romp through a fantasy world, which, if it wasn't for two or three really nasty water hazards, would be really fun and something to feel good to complete. This is the first game to feature a Health bar, but apart from the birds in the swamp, this is left mostly unused. Graphics are just the perfect level of cartoony, and the music doesn't seem to get annoying (even though there are several hidden unused .MODs on the disk!). Everything comes together nicely, and the only faults I have found are the height of the platforms in Grand Dizzys room, and basically, jumping the shark. As a solid conversion of the original I'd give it a high score, at least 7.5 out of 10.