Anyone like Dizzy games?

There's some good mini Dizzy adventures made with the Dizzyage engine and there's a competition on now to make some new ones. You can read about it here:

http://www.binaryjoy.co.uk/games/games-news/dizzyage-2008-compo/

I always wished those old games had a bloody save option though!

I loved them when I was a kid! :)

I even built a little Dizzy thing, not much, just copied the basic dizzy jumping, walking up slopes etc

I completed Dizzy 1,2,3 but never got to finish MagicLand Dizzy for some reason I cannot now recall.

A true set of classics from the Darlings! I wonder what happened to the Darling Brothers?

http://spong.com/article/12870

How cool is that? I loved the Dizzy games at the time. Nice find Jake.

welcome! I ended up playing one of these last night instead of Devil May Cry 3 :-)

Now they do - it's called a snapshot and most emulators have it as an option.

I'm getting confused now - I heard of the Darlings, but for some reason I always though it was the Oliver twins who were behind CodeMasters? Some of those games were absolute bargains for the ca$h.

Yeah quite a few years ago I went back over some classic C64 games with the snapshot game and managed to finish them for the first time, things like Ikari Warriors, Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Slapfight etc. It was GREAT.

Did my head in Dizzy. When you died and got sooooooo far. No save option either. Thank god for emulators!

Nice find indeed.

i had treasure island dizzy on the ST and thier pacman clone fast food dizzy
iir we never had a speccy dizzy in the house

but i always died underwater trying to pick something up
i wouldnt be close enough so id drop 'nothing' and move my snorkle up one
then sodds law says id accidentally drop the snorkle and die later on before reaching the shore line

Oh, that was a killer when you did that with the snorkel, and in someways, a nicely cheekily designed feature.

The thing that had me going for ages was the last coin in Fantasyland Dizzy... The one under the pier... I looked for hours at a time for it, for days on end I'd get to needing one coin so me and Daisy could buy that house in the trees.

Then one glorious day I was jumping along minding my own business and I fell through the crates and spied the last coin! WOOT

I thought I'd won the lottery! :D

By the way, I was going to do a drop of programming tonight, but instead, I've cracked open a bottle of peroni and just about to fire up this:-

http://www.yolkfolk.com/dizzyage/dz016.html

*This will surely knacker my free time up... Cheers Jake! :P*

Ok, i'm stuck now... The trolls asking me for 30 gold coins. I've activated all of the lifts. What do i do with the de-icer or book of matches?

The Darlings used to make games for Mastertronic, and left to form Codemasters. The Oliver Twins came on board to work with them from pretty much the beginning. It was the Oliver Twins who developed Dizzy and several of its sequels.

Ahhh the Oliver Twins! :)

Thats them, sorry about that, it has been a long time after all! ;)

Ah cheers Gabriel - that puts my mind to rest. I really haven't been brushing up on my useless knowledge of 8 bit trivia enough recently : )

They were good. The graphics were awesome (for the speccy)

Yeah it's to confuse the two sets of brothers as they both made classic games for code masters.

Incidentally, about 10 years ago I went to a trade show in London and the code masters was bigging up the original Colin McRae rally game and had an Impreza you could sit in and play the game. Futhermore on a stage up in the air, they had a continual pole dancing show with scantily clad ladies - it rocked! All the geeky types couldn't look (too shy I guess) and all the business types were all lined up having a good goggle.

Yeah, ideally I'd have enough free time to play them all on that site. Let me know when the first "time" shop opens...

Indeed, it's astonishing how many games those guys created between them. And an awful lot of them were damn good too. Makes you wonder how they managed to make a living, come to think of it, bearing in mind that they used to sell many of those games for £1.99 or £2.99. By the time shops and distributors had taken their chunk, their margins must have been real tight.

Yeah, £1.99 for a game, no wonder I had hundreds of them! :)

We'll never see them days again though.. ever!!! <--- OMG, I sound like my grandad

When I was a lad... blah... blah! ;)

I used to pop into town on the bus (half fare) and go to my local toy shop and pore over the 1.99 and oooh 2.99 games for ages trying to decide which to get (for Spec and later C64)

Same. Used to go to Micro Fun in Barnsley, or The Computer Store in Doncaster - both had a section full of Mastertronic games and stuff for £1.99, then there was the shelf with the big-box games on it which I didn't often bother looking at, except when I bought WEC Le Mans and Last Ninja 3. For something like £9.95 each.

Yeah, I pushed the boat out that day I can tell you.

I was forbidden from going into town so me and me mate used to sneak off without telling anybody. I think it was 10p on the bus.

Yeah it was very rare I bought a £9.95 game, normally with birthday money. One I did buy that I never regret is Laser Squad! Maybe my town in the country was a bit safer than yours and that's why I was allowed to go.

Heh, the 1.99/2.99 games were a godsend for skint kids.

Yeah, their margins must've been tight but they must have sold by the bucket load. Plus, most kids were just pirating the more expensive games because they couldn't afford many of them.

One of the local shops used to stock them, everytime I went to the shops with my mam I would almost certianly get a game, and if I wasnt allowed one, it was stampy feet time! :D hehehe

Ahh man them were't days. I used to frequent JKL Computers in Uxbridge. I was like Alladin's Cave to a kid! There were some real characters in there. One guy we referred to only as the tall guy who they seemed to use exclusively to get stuff off the high shelves and another known only as Greaseball who was a pretty unfriendly chap and chased a friend of mine out of the shop calling 'come back here, chicken s**t' when he accidentally broke a pin on one of the joystick ports. Oh how we laughed.

....then she'd say "pack that in, you're 19 ffs!"

;) @Gfk

Wasn't £1.99 alot of money back when you lot were young ;o) :oP

£1.99 Games -- Happy days!

Picking up stuff like Action Biker, Little Computer People, BMX Racers, Impossible Mission, and Exploding Fist

There were some really excellent titles for that price

Action Biker! Sponsored by KP Skips right? I never felt I fully explored the whole place and it was pretty hard (kept crashing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpYEQ45f1s.

Exploding Fist was the first beat 'em up I ever played, total classic + the jump over the bull minigame. Great chilled music too. Then later IK+ of course. Wonder if it influenced me to take up Aikido. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=165bezvsHS0

I sold all my C64 games, sob, but I still have my Spectrum ones here in a box. Let's see, they include:

Rockman (loved this)
Soul of a Robot (great atmos)
Storm Bringer (all those games were classic, bit like dizzy actually)
Rentakill Rita

some less good ones include:

The Empire Strikes back
Hercules
Flak
Devil's Crown
Future Games
Molecule Man

I still played them all for ages though. Just realised I'm missing Kane, a cowboy shooter.

> Just realised I'm missing Kane, a cowboy shooter

Was that the one where you hit a key as soon as the cowboy draws his weapon?

> I sold all my C64 games, sob

I've got a box full of C64 games. Not sure what. I think Jet Set Willy is in there though.

> Exploding Fist was the first beat 'em up I ever played, total classic

Memories ..
My brother and I got kicked out of a computer store for 'over-evaluating' fist. We must have been on it for 20 minutes when the shop keeper said, "If you're not going to buy it then clear off!"

can't specifically remember that bit, don't think so. It was this one: You also had to ride your horse. It had some atmostphere but wasn't great (too hard like MOST games were then).

I used to spend quite a while checking out the reviews in game mags and not purchasing (this is before the Internet you see). Guess that's a bit like "pirating" the info :-)

I think that was Law of the West.

you have to admit that some of the games for sale @ £1.99 were asking TOO much money for the tape they were on

cos some guys were prolific didnt always make em good at what they did

but there are some down right gems out there though

i think i only ever got £9.99 games if they were 10ish game compilations
i dont recall having that many taped games but schools were rife
how much were c90's in them days to buy in a shop ... laugh if the blank (longer) tape cost more than the game you were going to copy

I remember ghost and goblins on the Amstrad took an absolute age to load, and when comparing the magnetic tape inside it to a C90, I'm sure there was more in the games cassette.

I hated it when you would load a looonggg loading game up, say, before having your tea after school or something, then to return and find a 'Read error a' or something similar bit of text, so you had to rewind and start all over again.. it was a bugger!

:)

and we sit and whinge about loading inbetween levels of modern fps and the likes ;)

Yeah, we've never had it so good! Shame CD-ROM's dont make the 'der,dee,der... der,deeeeeeeeeeeeeeee' noises of auld!', just to bring back memories of sitting there blinking at the screen for 5 minutes waiting for a loading screen image to be drawn! ;)

Games would of loaded up much faster if they didnt have the loading screen! Bit pointless really when you think about it! :D

if it werent for the speccy loading sounds i dont think we'd have the likes of atari teenage riot knocking about

wether thats good or not is up to the individual to decide :))

Tapes you say boy? Tapes?!?

By heck lad, I remember in our day we had to manually drill holes into a card for tuppence a day and no bread and water.
Punch cards folk would call em. Ye don't know ya born young nipper!

Course the best things is when those little loading games with Rob Hubbard music started appearing on C64 1.99 and 2.99 tapes, they were awesome!

C64 was silent at loading which was nice, but at least you knew with the Spectrum if it had failed to load and was running on silent tape. Mind you the C64's plug in tape recorder (with tape counter) was a lot more reliable than plugging in a 3rd party tape recorder to the spectrum and trying to set it at exactly 7.25 otherwise it would fail to load, plus if someone came in the room too fast it would crash the loading etc.

Gremlin had some awesome 10 games compilations! Also there were some Now Games compilations that were good.

I once saw a game that said "100% BASIC" on the cover and it seemed proud of this horrendous fact. Unoptimised hell!

Also remember when the screenshots in the case were really for the C64 or Amiga and it never looked like that on your computer haha.

Those were the days, i still speak fluent speccy:

Burrrrrrrrrrrrrr-blip-.........burrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
blurbidyblurbidyblurbidyblurbidyblurbidy
....pause....
Burrrrrrrrrrrrrr-blip-.........burrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
blurbidywiaaaaaaarggggggggggggggchshschwscchw
chshhchschhchchscshchhhhhschwscchwsccsswschhhh
chhshshhwieaaaaaaghhhshchshhchschhchchscshchsc
hwscchwsccsswschhhhchhshshhwieaaaaaaghhhshchs
hhchschhchchscshchhhhhhhhhsccsswschhhhchhshshh
wieaaaaaaghhhshwaaaaaaaaaa.....

I remember thinking how cool the ocean games were for being able to hide their border with countdown and all :)

Now a real nerd will be able to name the game from Dan's rendition of the loading sound...

Impressive written sounds there :D

The thing is, they were priced for a kid to buy with his* pocket money, not for his* parents to buy with a day's wages.

[* As in, girls didn't buy them, let's be honest.]

Trying to sort out the Amstrad games (tip: look for the orange label) in Dundee's long-gone "John Menzies" store**, those were the days... the scene of my first Amiga Format purchase and the final Your Sinclair, which they admitted in the final editorial was a mere pamphlet sold for the price of a full magazine.

[** It's now a Tesco Metro. Not worth the trouble of entering. Even the GameStation three doors down is pointless now. Ever since GAME bought them out, the cool Sega Saturn/NeoGeo and Vectrex gear is no more. I mean, GAME is right across the precinct, so what's the point?]

Ah yes the coloured labels!

I didn't know gamestation was bought out by game. I liked gamestation as it had more used and retro stuff in it than Game.

I still have the original Dizzy Games I bought back when I was 10-11 years old.

for such a small place as cambridge we are over run by tesco's

but the game/gamestation issue
afaik our gamestation (3ish doors down from game) still has more 'retro' retro gear, but i dont go into either shop much ... i will when im ready to buy a 360 elite (or better if they upgrade by the time ive decided to buy)

i remember when EB and Game used to be the same company (after one bought the other out) in the lion yard you'd have a largeish Game (now demolished to make way for a path into the new grand arcade) and down the ways youd have a titchy EB then the bigger than EB game near the grafton (game station may have been there too at that time)
then they lost the rights to the EB franchise and all got rebranded as Game (unless they just got the lease sold off) so we had 3 Games

(2 large marks and spensers nigh on next to each other too many next's and a plethora of mobile phone and designer clothing stores (and a bucket load of tesco's) ... come now cambridge is f**king tiny we dont need THIS much repatition do we ?!?)

Amon: Collection-tastic! Wasn't crash a Spec mag? Interesting how C64 games tout the Spec mag reviews on them even though it will clearly be different on the C64.

Yes I remember EB, I still have a loyalty card! Even so, all these big computer shops never existed when I was a kid. You used to get games in toy shops, Dixons and some small privately owned computer shops.

I never go into mobile shops, there's so many, but I just don't ever use them.

my first job was a yts thingie 6 days a week for not much more than the giro
working in a local way out of the way independant computer shop that was an authorised amstrad and ibm pc dealer too

i went in there a lot iir when i was younger (not much choice in the matter) and their games selection was ok
when i started there circa 91 i forget exactly we still had bucket loads of £1.99 speccy tapes on a shelf which got sold off to the newsie next door, i had migrated to the amiga by then but was tempted to get a few 'classics' i missed out on first time round but as my 'wages' were so shite even a £1.99 game seemed out of the question after paying my mum 'rent' and bus fare on top of that too

@Ginger Tea. Very similar to me. I'd been in my local indie computer shop as a kid getting my Amiga and games, and I got a part-time job there when I was 19 for like £3 per hour. This is just when the 486 had come out and Doom was new, so like 1993 I think. Then I build my first PC (to play Doom) and my Amiga got put away and I never looked back.