My Head Is Spinning

I recently got this lovely mug from the equally lovely people at Blitz Games. It doesn’t look like much here, just quietly stating the fact that Blitz Games Studios has been ticking along nicely for the last twenty years. When you go and make a brew, however, as I am prone to do on many an occasion an amazing transformation occurs.

The darkness lifts and a colourful gaming world is revealed. And there, in the centre of it all, is Dizzy. Grinning happily, on a bridge, with his hands and feet strangely unattached to any part of his egg-shaped form.

In a lot of ways, I’ve helped to pay for this mug. As a child I loved the Dizzy games. I remember giving my dad £3 and asking him to write a cheque for £2.99 to some mail order games company in the back of Sinclair User so that I could get my hands on Treasure Island Dizzy. Somehow, ordering it that way seemed to be far easier than trailing all the way into town to buy it. The cheque was popped into an envelope and sent off and, as first class post used to work in those days, a few days later I was waiting, excitedly, for the game to arrive. So excitedly, in fact, that I would walk to to the top of the road and look for the postman on his rounds so that I could see when he was coming and be ready, behind the letterbox, to snatch the jiffy bag from his fingers.

And then it arrived. I had the game in my hand. I took the cassette from the case and put it into the tape deck of my Spectrum +2 and set it loading. And I waited some more. But I didn’t mind the wait this time – the game was mine, at last. The last three days had been a long wait – I could handle the however long it took to load now. Plus there was the added excitiment of getting to watch the load screen spring to life.

I played the game constantly for days on end, trying to complete it. Suffering death by falling, fire and drowning but loving every minute of it. Strange objects littered the game space, all of which had some kind of as yet unknown use in the game world. And then there were the hidden coins scattered throughout the game – I can still remember that there’s one on the main bridge and one hidden in the trunk of a tree.

So now, each and every time I make a cuppa, I am reminded of the Dizzy games and how much I used to love to play them. I’m also left with an intense yearning to play the games again. The closest thing I’ve found to Dizzy is Clover: A Curious Tale, a game which was influenced by the mighty Egg himself, so it’s no surprise that it’s similar.

I’d love the chance to get my hands on Dizzy again, but my Spectrums are sadly defunct – the +2 had, for some considerable time, required a pen knife to be jammed into a very specific part of the casing in order to make it work properly and a borrowed 48K model died a slow death as the P key ceased to function and then the ribbon cables inside just crumbed with old age. So my hopes lie with the likes of the  Xbox Live Arcade, but I know that the gamers of this day and age would demand 3D and other sorts of swish things – all of which would ruin the simplistic appeal of the game. As I played Dizzy on the Spectrum I would, of course, need a revamped version to have an option which enabled me to turn colour clash on because where’s the fun in playing without bits of the background colour seeping into your character?

Then there’s the rose-tinted glasses argument. Am I building up my memories of the yolky hero into something it wasn’t. Would I now, as a proper, mature, sensible adult of 33 still appreciate the simple gameplay, and the lovely egg-based puns?

You know what? I think I would.