Treasure Island Dizzy
| Developer: The Highlanders | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Codemasters | Sound: |
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| Year: 1989 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Platform-adventure | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
4/10 | |
The old folks keep telling us: video games make you crazy, video games make you violent, video games turn you into a raving psychopath.
And they’re right! Here’s the perfect example:
Lalala, a colourful little game with a welcoming tune.
A friendly, egg-shaped character with funny animations.
A vast world to explore, full of various items to collect.
Oh look, a little crab…
The little crab touched you. Start over.
A looping background tune.
Adorably cute environments.
One life. No health bar. Which means even the gentlest brush with a butterfly or a fly is instantly fatal.
Every time you die, you lose all your items and start again from scratch.
You fell into a trap. Back to the start.
The music is getting a bit repetitive. Really.
Invisible traps that you can’t possibly avoid the first time.
You fell into the trap again. Back to the start.
Lalala, hmmm…
Sometimes, when transitioning between screens, enemies spawn right on top of you. Just for laughs.
Ugly fish killed you. Back to the start.
An inventory system with three slots. Pick up a fourth item, and the first one gets dropped.
If the dropped item is your snorkel and you’re underwater … well, you drown!
Dead. Restart. Gniiiii…
An increasingly unbearable soundtrack.
Some spots leave you completely stuck. Oh, those jokester developers!
Start over!
Oh, a turtle. Start over!
A jellyfish! Start over!
The trap from earlier! Start over!
After hours of torture, you finally reach the end.
You meet a boat merchant (a merchant of one boat, singular) who tells you he’ll let you leave if you bring him 30 coins.
Problem: You’ve scoured the entire island, even bought a magazine with a full walkthrough and followed it religiously, and you don’t even have half that amount!
* * *
Fifteen years later. With the advent of home internet, you decide to dig deeper. Feverishly, you search online and discover that a large number of the coins are completely invisible, scattered randomly in the environment, with no clues whatsoever to help you find them.
This means you have to start over again—not that you weren’t expecting that—but now you’re also clicking every single pixel of every single screen to see if there’s a coin hidden somewhere.
While doing so, you fall into 17 traps, collide with 12 octopuses, 9 butterflies, 56 grasshoppers, and 183 torches camouflaged in the background. Did I not mention those damn torches?
Start over!
Start over!
Start over!
Start over!
Start over!
Start over!
Start over!
Lalala, I’m gonna murder the cat!
“Meoowww!”
“You fuck my wife?”
“No, not the straitjacket! I haven’t collected all the coins!”
* * *
So, consider yourself warned. It’s an original game, more suited to being used as a coaster. But rest assured, Treasure Island Dizzy is by far the most difficult and frustrating in the series. It can be found in the Dizzy Collection compilation.
Finally, know that Dizzy is a bona fide franchise that spawned numerous anonymous sociopath fan clubs. The first game, titled Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, was released in 1986 on the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum. About fifteen more titles followed, including a few arcade-style (brain-numbing) mini-games, but primarily adventure/platformers where you gather items to solve puzzles.
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