i lost my old playlists from my early days in good omens fandom since they were all on my old PC and itunes account that died
ok that’s unfortunate but i can make a new one on spotify, right?
so i make a new playlist and just call it ‘ineffable’
and look at what it recommended me
sasgdhfjk that’s some on point shit.
spotify KNOWS, man. spotify knows.
Kinda sad we didn’t get to see Aziraphale save his boyfriend Crowley from accidental gunfire, just before the dove scene (in which Crowley originally brought the bird back to life).
Aziraphale, beaming: You know, Crowley, I’ve always said that, deep down inside, you’re really quite a–
tv!Crowley, shoving Aziraphale into a wall:
Shut it! I’m a demon. I’m not nice. I’m never nice, nice is a four-letter word. I will not have–
book!Crowley:
All right. All right. Tell the whole blessed world why don’t you.
the best crowley i’ll ever draw. based off of that one pic yknow the one
Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn’t see why anyone else should. But Crowley liked sleep, it was one of the pleasures of the world. Especially after a heavy meal. He’d slept right through most of the eighteenth century, for example. Not because he needed to, simply because he enjoyed it.
Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he…“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman,
Good Omens:
The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
It is the weirdest fucking thing to see Good Omens shitposts.
Next it’ll be the Vorkosiverse…
Gallup all formats individual format chart, Computer & Video Games Issue 115, June 1991
Magicland Dizzy is not quite the final Spectrum game I will review, but it definitely sees the series hit its prime just as the curtain is coming down on the 8-bit era. Well, the era of its games topping the charts, anyway. Some games would keep coming out for the old computers, and people would keep playing them. I was still playing games on Commodore 64 only well past this point. And once again, time and memory can do some funny things.
I loved the Dizzy games I played as a child, and in the field of games where you progress by solving puzzles through the use of items I also loved Lucasarts’ Monkey Island graphic adventures (I’ve written before about why Monkey Island 2 is one of my favourite games ever). Because I played the latter several years later and on more advanced computers, I always thought of them as being the product of a slightly later and more developed time. In fact they were pretty much contemporaries, with The Secret of Monkey Island sitting right alongside (appropriately) Treasure Island Dizzy in the chart at one point.
Behind the technical curve and fine with it, Dizzy being developed with 8-bit computers in mind meant that there weren’t any big technical advances to mark out Magicland Dizzy from its predecessors. Instead, Dizzy’s new creative team (less series creators the Oliver twins and only carrying over David Whittaker from Fantasy World Dizzy) could focus on improving the experience in other ways. Like a plot which goes beyond getting to one location and/or rescuing damsel-in-distress Daisy! Instead a whole carton of Dizzy’s egg friends are trapped in different unfortunate fairy tale fates. As an added bonus this includes a new character called Dora, so Daisy is also no longer the Smurfette of the situation.
The change in plot structure is followed through in other structural improvements. To get anywhere much at the beginning of the game, you do have to make a rather tricky traversal of a moat, via a travelling pointed fin. Once you have jumped the shark, though, large numbers of screens and objects are immediately accessible. Coupled with the many small objectives that are clearly there to be worked towards, this gives a lot of different options of what to do next at any point, which is a great design decision for a hybrid platform-puzzle game. To progress you have to get better at platforming and figure your way around obstacles, and you also have to solve puzzles. Having a basket of different puzzles to work on means that you can take on something new each time you get a game over, honing your platforming skills without the deadening repetition common to early games.
All of that is enough to make Magicland Dizzy the best Dizzy game so far, but it’s not why I remember it so much more fondly than the others. That’s in the nature of the puzzles it has. There was one puzzle in Fantasy World Dizzy which involved trading a tiny cow for a bean and then planting it in some manure to grow a giant beanstalk, set up by a character telling you to do what Jack did. That’s the template for just about everything in Magicland, except it doesn’t give you the set up. It just lets you work out that you need to, for instance, take transformed-into-a-frog-Dora to Prince Charming, use a gold cross to fend off a vampire, rub a lamp to summon a genie.
We’re not talking anything with commentary on its source material even on the level of Shrek, and yet the intertextuality is rather magical. Games involve learning a set of rules to follow, but instead of just its own rules, Magicland Dizzy invites you to draw on all the rules that fairy stories and fantasy tropes have already taught you (assuming that they have – there is admittedly an inherent exclusivity to this approach). Joining up the familiar dots gives a different kind of intellectual buzz, and it opens new avenues for humour. There is a screen near the start called The Haunted Swamp which you can’t get past because of a couple of ghosts. What do you need to defeat them? A power pill! Pac-Man is given a place in the fairytale canon, and expectations are brilliantly undercut. Elsewhere, if you don’t remember your Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland well enough to correctly decide which of the eat-me cake or drink-me potion to use with a magically enlarged Daisy, things will go very wrong, in the best reward for failure the series has offered yet.
Magicland Dizzy’s way of showing how games can be in conversation with a wider world and don’t have to be hermetically sealed, or open only to imitating blockbuster films, remains charming and surprising. Dizzy really wasn’t all so backwards after all.
arcticflakes
