For players of a certain age, and especially for players who grew up playing games in the UK on machines like the Amiga 500, Spectrum or Atari ST this is quite possibly the most exciting release on the Evercade yet. The Oliver Twins Collection features 11 games, and could have easily been titled ‘The Dizzy and Friends Collection’.
For those of you who don’t know, the Oliver Twins refer to Philip and Andrew Oliver who are two brothers who won a Guinness World Record for developing a huge amount of games in the 8-bit era. Add to that that they started when they were teenagers and that they created the much loved Dizzy franchise and you can understand why they get the top billing on this collection.
It’s also of note that all profit from this collection will go to the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield in the UK. Coincidentally, the Museum is a place I visited to cover in an upcoming episode of our Jet Lagged and Loving It travel series, so be sure to look out for that when it drops.
The Collection features the following games: The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, Wonderland Dizzy, Panic Dizzy, Go! Dizzy Go!, Dizzy the Adventurer, Mystery World Dizzy and Treasure Island Dizzy…so you can see why I thought it could be called the Dizzy and Friends Collection. In terms of friends, the other games include Dreamworld Pogie (who is a character featured in Dizzy games) and also Super Robin Hood, Firehawk, and Professional BMX Simulator.
As always in this series of reviews of Evercade titles, lets now take a look at each game individually as we figure out if this is a cart you should add to your collection!
The first game we’ll look at is Dizzy the Adventurer, which is by far my favourite Dizzy game of all time. It would appear that the games presented in this collection are NES ports, which is a shame, as I remember playing many of the same games on my Amiga, and those versions had better graphics than the NES. It’s also worth noting that this game Dizzy the Adventurer will be more familiar to many of you as Dizzy Prince of the Yolkfolk, but clearly had a name change for the NES.
If you’ve never played a Dizzy game before, here’s what you’re in for. Most of the Dizzy games on this cart are puzzle adventure platform games where you control a walking talking egg known as Dizzy. In each of his adventures you must collect items and interact with NPCs to complete fetch quests, do some platforming and defeat the Wizard Zaks.
You always have an inventory where you can pick up and hold two or three items to solve puzzles. Dizzy Prince of the Yolkfolk does a great job of teaching players how this works on it’s very first screen as you start trapped in a cave and must pick up and use three items in a row to escape. It really teaches you the mechanics for everything else you’ll do in the game in the opening minute.
One thing I always loved about these games is that unlike Mario where you would continually run and jump through levels to reach the end point Dizzy games would feel like a cross of Mario with Monkey Island style point and click adventures. Almost every screen you encounter will feature a puzzle or character you can interact with, and you need to speak with them to find out what items are needed to progress past them. This can range from taking a joke book to a crying princess to cheer her up or catching the mouse like Pogie in a cage which requires both the cage and bait to complete the puzzle.
Dizzy The Adventurer is perhaps the shortest Dizzy game featured in this collection, and considering most of the games come from the era where you would have to complete the game in one sitting, it is always the Dizzy game I have returned to over the years as it feels a good length for an afternoon’s playthrough. The fact that the Evercade give you the option to save you games at any point make all games a blast to chip away at. This will also test if I still feel that this particular game is still my favourite as time goes on.
Next up is The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, and what can I say? It’s more Dizzy, and like the Prince of the Yolk Folk, this is another solid adventure. You once again have to defeat Zaks and rescue Dizzy’s girlfriend Daisy. Unlike some games in the series which feature static screens that you move between, this is one of the games that features scrolling locations, although these are just larger screens that you move between and are not completely open ended like a Sonic or Mario level.
This game gives Dizzy a damage metre which will quickly fill up if you touch any monsters or bugs that populate the world. You have to keep an eye on this as Dizzy doesn’t slow down or have any animation to show he’s taking damage and you can be caught off guard by this.
Another big issue I noticed when playing this game is that you can drop essential items that you need to complete the game behind scenery which can make them impossible to find later. This can be an easy mistake to make, and as a large area of the game take place within the sprawling network of treehouses at the start of the game, backtracking your steps to look for a lost item may prove frustrating.
Despite this, the gameplay, music and characters you meet along the way still make this another great adventure you’ll have fun exploring.
To take a break from the egg for a moment let’s take a look at Firehawk, which is a fun top down shooter game. You control a plane and have to shoot enemies and destroy enemy bases whilst aiming to rescue comrades. This adds a lot of strategy to the game as you first have to navigate through fire to locate the person you’re rescuing and then have to decide if you’re going to fight all the enemies in the area first, or if it’s best to try to swoop in and risk taking a little damage for a quicker rescue.
The game gives you an indicator where to go to head to rescue the person and this felt a very modern inclusion in the game as these regularly pop up in modern shooters to just guide you where to go next instead of leaving you to fully explore yourself. In the case of Firehawk this is definitely a good thing as the tiny graphic of the person you are rescuing could easily be missed otherwise.
Back to Dizzy we have the oldest Dizzy game in the collection here in Treasure Island Dizzy. It’s odd that the original Dizzy game isn’t included, but perhaps that’s just because it didn’t receive a NES port.
Once again this is more of Dizzy’s usual fun adventures, and truthfully at this stage it’s getting hard to review these games separately except to point out quirks with individual titles that perhaps got improved upon in later games. As an early Dizzy game this one doesn’t have scrolling levels, but that’s fine. It just means instead of there being wasted expanses of level to walk through to bulk out the time it takes to play it, each screen has to have it’s own unique personality.
The inventory in this game is a bit of a pain compared to later games in that it is on screen the whole time and the way you select items to use is by clicking the one button that will pick up/put down and use the items you are holding. This sounds ok, but if you have the items in the wrong order that you’d want to use them in it can cause disaster. As an example I got a snorkel which allowed me to go underwater and whilst exploring the bottom of the ocean I figured I’d try to use some of the other items I was carrying to see if they were of use, and I instantly found when cycling through the items that I had had put down my snorkel and drowned instantly. In this instance I feel it would have been better for them to give you a limited time you can go to breath underwater like Sonic, as an instant death meant restarting the game for what felt like an unfair reason.
Likewise when I restarted I decided to not take other items underwater so if there were any I didn’t to pick up there would be the inventory space. It was here I discovered that I had left a pogo stick I needed back on land. No problem normally if you need to backtrack for an item, but it was here I realised that by entering the water without the pogo stick I wasn’t able to jump over a fish and return to the land…this kind of instant death and unwinnable situation was common in games of the past, but modern David finds it a bitter pill to swallow.
The next game is BMX Simulator, and it’s exactly what you’d expect a game with that title to be. Played from a top down perspective you race around various tracks in races against two computer controlled opponents. This game adds some variety to the cartridge, but wasn’t a game I enjoyed.
Not all games should be easy, and some do require skill to master, but even on the easiest track I was just constantly crashing into every little bump and then you fall of your bike. Many racing games will have that if you hit rough patches you slow down and lose acceleration, but just repeatedly getting knocked off the bike was such a pain and frustrating to play.
I kept going with it and eventually got the hand of the controls and it’s a game where you constantly have to accelerate then let go of the accelerate button as you go around every corner and obstacle. In one sense this is true to actual driving to make sure you slow down and don’t crash on corners, but this doesn’t make for a fun game.
A half step back towards Dizzy here with Dreamworld Pogie. This is another game which is really what the Evercade is all about in that it is a classic game that was never released back in the day. The game is a 2D platformer and much more like a Sonic/Mario style affair than what the Dizzy games are. You run across levels and pick up stars whilst avoiding baddies.
This is actually a really fun game to play and it’s a shame it wasn’t released back in the day. Perhaps the Pogie wasn’t seen as a marketable mascot in his own right outside the Dizzy games. The character as mentioned earlier is a small purple mouse thing, and whilst it looks slightly odd just when you see it in game, you need to see the thing in more detailed artwork like you get when you complete a level.
The box art of the game highlights that you can pick up a power up and transform into a were-pogie like creature and shows off that his normally round ears go pointy and furrier, but this distracts from how weird the actual character is. When you complete a level you see it in it’s full glory and it is kinda like a head with legs and arms coming out of it with no body. The nose is too realistic and the visible nostrils, combined with the thick eyebrows and Prince Charles ears make for one ugly beast and not the cute character I think it’s intended to be. I do feel bad that I am kind body shaming this human head/mouse combo, but it has a overly human quality which makes it more terrifying than the original Sonic the Hedgehog design from the movie…It is however a good game and I just needed to get that off my chest!
Up next we have Go! Dizzy Go! Which is different kind of Dizzy game and is best described as a Pac Man style game. In it you control Dizzy from a top down perspective and have to collect items in a maze whilst avoiding baddies. It’s a lot of fun and there are bonus levels which add time based challenges and icy ground which means there is more strategy to the order you collect the items in which add variety to the game play.
This is another game where it’s great that the Evercade lets you save as you can do a few levels here and there when you want a break from standard Dizzy adventuring and can try a maze puzzle based game.
Mystery world Dizzy is another game that wasn’t released back in the day. It’s incredible to think that so many games were just laying around finished but unreleased. It really makes you wonder what other treasures are hidden in attics of developers.
The game is another fun Dizzy adventure, but it is worth noting that the game did glitch on me when loaded it up a couple of times. Upon investigation I realised that this happened whilst I had the game set to be in PAL TV mode which I’d only selected absent mindedly on the title screen.
The actual game has some of the best graphics of any Dizzy game in the collection and you can tell this is a much later developed game as it even warns you to not drop items behind scenery. The inventory is back to two items and you do juggle through them on screen rather than choose the specific item. This game also brings back the one hit kill on Dizzy, and with all the rats running about you have to be careful to time your moves to dodge getting hit.
Panic Dizzy should be one of the most fun games in the collection, but it just proved annoying really quickly. It’s a puzzle which has a few varieties of gameplay for you to choose from. This includes matching up symbols, slide puzzle style levels, and removing tiles in a set order.
Most of these play the same in that you control Dizzy or one of his friends such as Daisy or Dozy or Denzel etc and you grab a tile that is falling down a Tetris style well and then throw it back up to a new position to match it with other tiles. In theory this is ok, but even though the tiles don’t feel like they’re falling that fast the tiles are so big that within a minute or two it’s always game over.
The reason for this is because you often need to grab a few tiles to reorder them and when you do this they all stack up on top of you and quickly you’ll find that the next tile you need is either buried above or in the middle of the stacked tiles you’re holding. It’s just something that seems like it should work, but doesn’t. One of the biggest examples of this is the sliding puzzle style game where you may need to rearrange the top line of the puzzle but have to move all other pieces out of the way to get to it. This is like having to remove every wheel form a car just to fix one.
Then there are the puzzles where you have to move across tiles in the right order to clear them. This is different to the other modes and feels fun. I did become aware that on some levels it was impossible to fail them as you could only press the d-pad in the direction that would complete the level. This would be ok if it was a tutorial level, but I found it was several consecutive quite a few levels in.
Super Robin Hood is a great game in the collection, and was the first hit from the Oliver Twins. The game is an action platformer. It reminded me of a Metroid game in ways with the puzzles, platforming, shooting and whilst you don’t roll into a ball, there are areas where you have to slide dive through small gaps.
It can be completed in about 30-40 minutes and is a fun game that again you’ll be pleased has the save function on the Evercade just so an annoying bat or archer doesn’t end the fun early for you. It’s worth noting that old games that are short by modern standards relied on easy deaths and tough challenges to increase their lifespan and the ability to save now does alter how we play these games. Truthfully if I couldn’t save I probably wouldn’t get through a lot of these games, but for speed runners the ability to save and learn a game inside and out will help train players up for the daunting ‘no save runs’.
The last game on the menu for today is Wonderland Dizzy, which gives you the ability to play as both Dizzy and Daisy! This is the final game included in this collection that was another modern release of a previously unavailable game, and it was super strange to play for me.
This game is based on the game Magic Land Dizzy, which is possibly my second favourite Dizzy game, but it’s not exactly as I remember it by a long way. It seems to follow the same blueprint and in that sense is still a really fun Dizzy adventure, but different enough that I just generally felt discombobulated as my memory couldn’t trust if I remembered things or if the familiar Dizzy scenarios was making me think that I did. Either way this was another great addition to the package.
Conclusion
So there you have The Oliver Twins Collection! Over all this is possibly my favourite Evercade release yet. This is party due to my own nostalgia of the games included, but I guess that is kinda the whole point of the Evercade. The Dizzy games vary in their needs for a few quality of life improvements that would bring them up to modern standards, but they still do hold up really well.
It would be great to see these all remade with modern graphics and gameplay tweaks and I’m sure Dizzy could return to prominence once more. I do remember that a remake of Prince of the Yolk Folk did find its way to iOS a few years ago and it’s a shame that that version isn’t on here as it’s a game that hasn’t been updated to work on modern iPhones/iPads and would have been perfect for this collection. Potentially if there should be an Oliver Twins Collection 2 that would be a good option.
I also would have liked to have seen the Amiga versions of these games available on the cartridge rather than the NES versions as their graphics were much nicer in my opinion.
The non Dizzy adventure games are a a bit more of a mixed bag. Super Robin Hood is great and Firehawk is fun as well. Dreamworld Pogie is a great game to get on here as well, but BMX Simulator is in my opinion the weakest game in the selection. The Dizzy puzzle games are OK, but Panic Dizzy feels broken as a concept that didn’t really work for me.
Despite this if you are a fan of puzzle platform games and just want a jolly time on your Evercade this is a great game collection to get for the retro inspired machine!
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