The first iconic video game mascot of my childhood, the one whose series I played multiple games of, the one who I could talk to uncles and aunts and cousins about and get a knowing response, was not Mario or Sonic. It was a happy anthropomorphic egg wearing boxing gloves named Dizzy. He was a big deal. And hey, we’re seeing Dizzy in Super Chart Island before either of those other two characters, so in the UK I probably wasn’t that unusual. The hedgehog and plumber have more than caught up in recognisability here over the years since, with barely any efforts to revive Dizzy past the initial series’ end in the early ‘90s, but there was a time when he was on top. Very possibly a time helped by the fact that his games cost around a tenth as much.
Dizzy’s games have admittedly aged a lot less well, though that isn’t a completely neutral statement of explanatory fact. If there was an alternate history where the wider world had the same Dizzy nostalgia, things might be different. If I was looking back from the other side of thirty years of games influenced by and referencing Dizzy, where there were hits called Dizzy 3D World and Dizzy Generations, its flaws might not look so much like flaws. If unforeseeable sudden death traps and testing every spot for hidden objects were the accepted standard for everything, they might not look like such a problem.
Fantasy World Dizzy, the third game in the Dizzy series, doesn’t actually have that many unforeseeable sudden death traps, providing a forward development in a series which you can very much see find its (booted, semi-detached) feet across installments. The original Dizzy the Ultimate Cartoon Adventure was little more than a proof of concept, a jazzed-up flip-screen platformer of the old Jet Set Willy school with a bit less emphasis on impossible platforming and some limited puzzles of the ‘use Key A in lock A’ variety. Sequel Treasure Island Dizzy built on that by adding a clear sense of theme and setting to the place Dizzy somersault-rolled around, and bringing through personality, humour, deeper puzzles, and a sadistic difficult level. It didn’t go in for Rainbow Islands-level cuteness, but the clean and friendly charm of its aesthetic helped too.
Fantasy World Dizzy gives you three lives and a slightly easier time, and comes up with extra ways to bring personality through. There are a lot more characters to talk to, and every puzzle-solving or death is heralded by large text boxes describing the action in considerably more dramatic terms than can depicted without their aid. It has a decent running joke where almost none of Dizzy’s fellow egg-people (‘yolk folk’) are actually willing to help him on his quest. You can accidentally-on-purpose push one of them into the sea in revenge. There is a screen called “Bottomless Well”, and if you fall down the well you emerge at the other end in an upside-down world and meet a man with a hat with dangling corks who says “strewth”.
Going even beyond those progress-relevant but funny points, there are items entirely for amusement, like the bottle of whiskey item near the beginning which doesn’t have any useful purpose but which Dizzy can’t resist drinking, his intoxication portrayed via reversed controls. Fantasy World Dizzy offers a deal with the player that while the game is going to demand unfair things, and do unfair things to you, it is going to offer you a little something extra to make up for it. There are points where it stretches the unfairness a bit too far – like the room full of platforms indistinguishable from the background, which I remember as a child getting stuck in and thinking was actually a glitch. There is still too much just collecting keys. And the story isn’t exactly the most coherent or fully realised. Dizzy was still not entirely hatched. But get past the hard shell, and there is something alive with imagination.
