Dizzy! The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure Review (Amstrad)

Dizzy! The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure is the first title in what proved to be a long running series. This is where it all started with the original idea growing to be part of the blueprint for many games and genres to come. Here we see our hero, Dizzy, trying to find a number of items to make a potion and get rid of the dreaded wizard Zaks.

At this stage of the series the game is still based mainly in the platform genre with the adventure and puzzle elements taking a secondary role. Unlike in later titles, were he has a more generous inventory, Dizzy can carry only one item. This can become tiresome as objects are generally as far away as possible from where they need to be. This would not be so bothersome but most locations have two or three items to pick up. This means the player having to complete a number of journeys back and forth across the map.

The platforming itself is of a decent standard. There are few pixel perfect jump moments. But once you have the required understanding of how our hero leaps and rolls the jumps prove to be not much of a problem.

Unlike the Dizzy games that followed, this first title is absolutely jammed to overflowing with enemies. Any contact with the nasty creatures spells instant death. The spiders are easy to predict as they just move up and down but the birds, especially when two are on screen at once, pose a far greater threat as their flight patterns carry them across the whole screen.

Unfortunately the title contains a number of bugs that can make it impossible to finish. For instance, if players are too slow to catch the 'silver lining' of a cloud as it falls it will land in an unreachable position on the left hand side of a hut. Another instance occurs in the haunted forest where clouds cover a pit. Unless the player jumps between the clouds at the right time they will blow away leaving the pit impossible to get across. This is especially irritating as you must remember to jump at the right place every time you cross the pit.

The game also suffers from slowdown when rooms become cluttered with items and enemies and then speeding up dramatically at other times. This proves off putting given the tricky nature of the obstacles you need to negotiate. The environments themselves are functional if a little uninspired and comprise of platform stalwarts of such as a spooky castle, underground caves and a mountain region.

The puzzles are often obscure but the screens normally have a box at the top containing scrolling text. The text contains a hint such as "the ground seems hollow" or "the maiden has a broken heart" These hints turn what would be tricky puzzles into very simplistic ones and would benefit from taking a slightly more cryptic approach.

Dizzy may have been the game that started what turned out to be a long running and highly enjoyable series, but the first iteration of it simply lacks enough to make you want to see it through to the end. After a while the constant need to trudge back and forth from one side of the map to the other just becomes dull and repetitive. There is no doubting that the first Dizzy game represents a good idea, but it was the instalments that followed that really made the series fun.

6/10

Magicland Dizzy Review (Amstrad)

 

The fourth game in the Dizzy series sees our hero thrown into a mystical fairy tale kingdom. Here the evil wizard Zaks has imprisoned Dizzy's friends and it is up to the intrepid egg to rescue everyone and return home. Much like the titles that precede it Magicland Dizzy is a platform puzzle adventure centred on the exploits of Dizzy the egg.

Puzzles are based heavily around various fairy stories. Depending on the player's knowledge of said tales completion of the tasks will either be relatively straight forward or more in the realms of teeth grinding obscurity.

Solving puzzles revolves around the series gameplay tradition of retrieving an object from an awkward place and taking it elsewhere. Dizzy can now carry three items at one time which reduces the need for backtracking. This allows for more complex puzzles and creates one of the most ingenious solutions in the series history (involving a sleeping friend and a shocking solution).

The platform aspect of the series retains the fine line between players needing to be a fair judge of how our egg shaped hero will role and just being ridiculously unforgiving. Most of the time death will be due to a miscalculation on the players behalf, but surviving certain sections, like taking a blind jump down a well without knowing what item you need, are more down to luck and memory tests than any form of real skill.

Looking back on Magicland Dizzy now, it is surprising to see that if anything, the game has actually improved with time. Graphically the Amstrad version of the title is simple but highly effective. Characters, objects and scenery are clearly drawn and coloured with a single colour against a black background. The simple design allows for the game to look as clear now as the day it first hit our screens.

Like many 8-bit titles it can be viewed as simplistic in terms of game mechanics and there is certainly not much in the way of true innovation. But the attention to detail and little touches really raise the game above the mass of pretenders. Things like having a bag of rubbish and an empty milk bottle outside the backdoor of the magical castle will raise a smile from all but the most cynical.

The game world itself is deceptively small, but even so there is a large amount of variation in the locations. Every area is interesting enough to make you wonder what is around the next corner and will have players pushing on until they have seen every last section.

In today's gaming culture of vast landscapes and millions of pixels on screen it is sometimes good to look back and see that the same feeling of adventure can be achieved with more simple tools. Magicland Dizzy’s gameplay is still strong enough to offer something to players and contains more charm per pixel than most of the bland, shiny fodder that stock the shelves of your local game shop. Far from being looked upon with rose tinted glasses the title is even more enjoyable now than it was all those years ago. For that more than anything else we whole-heartedly recommend it.

8/10