I have fond memories of Magicland Dizzy on the Amiga and I always wanted to play more Dizzy games, but other games always seemed to get in the way. The Evercade is a platform that let’s me focus more on certain games and the Oliver Twins Collection starts out with Treasure Island Dizzy, a game that I remember booting up a few times in the Amiga days, but never actually played. The graphics didn’t appeal to me back then. The opening screen has a very large amount of ugly yellow. This always put me off. Especially when there were so many games on the Amiga with way better graphics.

When I look at the screenshots of the Commodore 64 version, I’m tempted to try that version out some time, because it looks quite eery with the black backgrounds. I probably won’t get very far in it though, because of lack of savestates.

This game is unplayable to me without savestates. You have only one life and die after the first hit. Imagine being two hours into the game, which in itself would require a huge amount of trial and error, and dying because of one wrong move. Big respect to all the players that played through the whole game back in the days!

And no, I won’t play the C64 version with an emulator. Not when I have the real deal sitting next to me.

I got stuck quite early on, because I jumped over the fish into the water. When you do this, there’s no way you can get out of the water. You have to wait for the fish to swim away and then enter the water. That way, you can get out of the water again. I discovered this after doing quite a lot of things in the water and out of it at the other side. I had to restart. A design flaw that developers nowadays won’t get away with.

Of course, I also died a couple of times because I dropped the snorkel while underwater. You have to be very careful with arranging the items in the correct order, or else you won’t be able to proceed. I read somewhere that this snorkel mechanic is the reason that you only have one life. The Olivers wanted to add more lives, but couldn’t work around the issue when you die because you dropped the snorkel underwater, because you would then simply die again.

Right now I’m stuck at getting a key for the boat. I need another valuable thing to trade it for. Now what would that be?