Bobinator

the 80s home computer game scene (zx spectrum, c64, msx, others in the UK and JP; US ones to a lesser extent) is fascinating for a bunch of reasons:

1. by modern standards, 2/3 or more of the library were indie titles

2. probably partly for that reason, there were a lot of games that do not really resemble any typical "genre," including what was available on consoles at the time. I've seen Spectrum games that are completely unique, unlike anything else made before or since.

3. and yet, they also had their own stable of genres.

there were certainly a lot of home computer games that aped arcade or console hits (poorly, in almost all cases) and my greatest interest is of course in the games that are genres unto themselves, but i feel like most titles for e.g. the spectrum were drawn from a small set of Home Computer Genres that didn't really make the leap to consoles or to later generations of computer games.

some examples:

1. The Eternal Isometric Chasm, e.g. Knight Lore. You wander around an immense world seen in isometric perspective. Dozens or hundreds of rooms linked by doors, each one filled with enemies and platforms that move in cycles. Sometimes you can jump. I get the impression that completing these requires dozens of hours of work even if you know what to do.

2. The Frustrating Platform Escape Room, e.g. manic miner. You begin at the bottom of a screen full of platforms (some moving), enemies, and pickups, and have to reach an exit, sometimes just by moving carefully to avoid getting hit, and sometimes only after collecting a key, or all the "jewels" or whatever.

3. The Side View House, e.g. Jet Set Willy. Similar to #1 except that you're moving around a contiguous world made up of rooms linked together, and can usually move freely from place to place, backtracking through places you've been to find paths to new rooms. Usually the enemies are a lot more batshit and hard to avoid, and the platforming much harder.

4. The Dizzy, e.g. Dizzy. Like #3, but the world is physically larger and often outdoors. Lots of platforming, lots of enemies moving in cycles that one-shot you, as usual for all the other genres, but the primary difference is that you have an inventory. Gameplay consists of finding items and taking them somewhere else to solve puzzles; you pick up the boot and give it to the old drunk guy (britain!!) and he moseys off, or you fix the moving platform with the gear, or whatever.

This last one has always frustrated me. There were a ton of Dizzy games (and not a small number of clones) and as I understand it they were pretty well regarded, and this makes sense if you think of them as a precursor to the Metroidvania. In the sense that you're exploring a huge world, balking at obstacles, backtracking to find ways to open up new areas, you could just call them a weird kind of point and click adventure game - the difference is basically that these are all tediously precise platformers, so there is an action element.

I can imagine that when these were new, their sheer scope and depth made them stand out from anything else on the market, and they do seem very carefully designed, so I have a lot of respect for them, but man - the limited inventory is just infuriating. Usually the way it works is that your inventory is full most of the time, so when you find an item to pick up, you have to swap something else for it. This sucks.

In a point and click adventure, you just pick up everything, and then if you're ever stuck, you can play the "drop everything on it and see if something reacts" game. With a game like this, you have to predict what you might need next - without having actually made it to the places where you'll be using these items. So if you guess wrong and swap out the wrong item, then you'll find yourself backtracking (often through rooms full of enemies to suck up your extremely limited lives) to pick it up, assuming you can remember where the hell you left it. You can't even cheat by using a walkthrough or map, because the items don't go back to their original spawn points! You have to keep track of where YOU left things. Ugh!

It's that 1980s home computer syndrome, where the devs went "well, we can't fit 40 hours of gameplay into 16 kilobytes, so we need to give people a reason to buy this six dollar cassette tape. let's make them do 40 minutes of backtracking every time they complete a puzzle." I often wonder if Dizzy would actually be fun in the modern era if it simply had no inventory size limit.

I forgot to mention the other problem with the item puzzles in these games, and it's that they're just as obscure as any other adventure game, which just compounds the tedium. Case in point:

Dizzy: Prince Of The Yolkfolk starts with you stuck in a tiny cave behind a locked door. You are near three items: a bucket, a leaf, and a match. You might think "I'll burn the door down with the match" pretty quickly but I don't think anyone's going to immediately click with the idea that the green, lush leaf is actually a pile of leaves you can use as kindlng, or that the bucket already has water in it. You set the leaf in front of the door, light it on fire, then extinguish it with the bucket. Yeah, anyone will eventually figure it out, but they also put all the items right in front of the door and you have nowhere else to go. Other fetch quests are less obvious.

Throughout games like this you have to deal with plenty of "give the boot to the drunk" puzzles where you just cannot predict what item is going to be the key. It's bad enough that you may have to backtrack through half the world to get it, but you also likely won't even know what it is, and will have to pick up two more random items on the way to try, thus perturbing the item locations even further.

Worse, some items are decoys - there's a guy in Prince who gives you a magic carpet; apparently useless. There's also some Tasty Bread; also apparently useless. So you're going to spend the entire game going "shit, I can't get the troll to leave the bridge. should i give him the bread? let's go get the bread. that didn't work, should I give him the cherries? let's go get the cherries". It just seems like an almost malicious timesink.

I sorta get it, because if you cut out all the pointless backtracking I think this game is about fifteen minutes long, if that. But, comma, still,

Back in the late 90s, a British ZZTer by the name of Zenith Nadir recreated three Dizzy games in ZZT: Fantasy World, Magic Land, and Treasure Island entirely from memory. Each game was released one at a game, and a year a later a cleaned up compilation was released which is linked above (and can be played in your browser!).

1. this is incredible and i have so much respect

2. open for the best ansi dragon you've seen this year