Have You Played... Fast Food Dizzy?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Dizzy is an egg. I had an egg for breakfast this morning. Therefore, Dizzy must be food. In Fast Food Dizzy, he is trying to eat all of the other food. What does it all mean? That the food chain coils back on itself and becomes the oroborous and that we are all somebody's breakfast in the end.

I loved Fast Food Dizzy. My parents must have thought I was a big fan of eggs because they bought me anything with the sentient cackleberry on the boxart. Either that or the only games available in British gaming stores during the late eighties and early nineties were those made in the vicinity. It's the only thing that could possibly explain a six year old kid getting a game called Streaker for Christmas.

Tearing the wrapping off a present and finding a Dizzy game inside was a right punch in the gut though. I'd already played through Treasure Island Dizzy when I received Fast Food and it had been an utterly miserably experience. The world was small and the puzzles made no sense to me (I haven't played it since I was tiny and it's entirely possible that I was just stupid back then, as all children are). What a relief it was, then, that Fast Food Dizzy was an arcade game and that there wasn't a single puzzle in sight.

It's Pac-Man, basically, but Pac-Man with moving food. Fast food, you might say. I liked the level designs though, which were made to look like real places (gardens, malls etc) rather than abstract mazes. OF course, they became abstract mazes in the later levels but for a while at least I could pretend I was an egg chasing food around real world locations. That was fun.

I don't know if you can or should play Fast Food Dizzy today. You probably can't. You probably shouldn't. But I've thoroughly enjoyed remembering it and I reckon it's the secret-best Dizzy game.