Disco tech
And it didn’t matter anyway. In a cruel callback to the previous game, upon rescuing Daisy, the ungrateful witch would wave you away to find 30 gold coins to buy a house and live “happily ever after”.
If this game was made today, there’d be an option to ditch the gold-digger and remain single.
Grub up
There was a spiritual successor to Fast Food in the form of Kwik Snax [sic], which utilised the same engine, but involved pushing blocks around to fell enemies and obtain the titular “snax”. Whilst it sadly didn’t retain the simple cartoony charm and character of Fast Food, it was a nice diversion.
Another spin off was Dizzy Panic! At the Disco, a surprisingly tricky puzzler which saw you inserting objects through appropriately-shaped holes. Please add your own innuendo in the comment section.
One man went to moat
The fourth adventure game, Magicland Dizzy, saw The Oliver Twins hand the development baton to Big Red Software. The result was more a slight refinement of the series, and basically brought us more of the same. This time, the original antagonist Zaks was back with a floppy-sleeved vengeance, and had cast some delightfully apt spells upon the Yolkfolk.
For example, Dylan is rooted to the floor, quite literally becoming one with the earth, Denzil is so cool that he’s now entombed in ice, and... well, you get the idea. While the classic fairytale aesthetic was pleasant enough, it lacked the macabre feel of the original game. The relentlessly chipper in-game music didn’t help either.
Mire, oh mire
By the time the fifth game, Spellbound Dizzy, was released, I’d acquired a Sega Mega Drive, and I didn’t commit nearly as many hours to my once beloved series, so to this day I never have completed it. It was easily one of the biggest and hardest of its ilk, sporting over a hundred screens, and bafflingly, introduced the facepalm-inducing notion that Dizzy would lose energy if he landed from a great height.
A sign of old age, perhaps? It also had a really unnerving “nyam nyam” animation whenever Dizzy ate a health-regenerating apple. I did rediscover it in uni in the form of a Speccy Emulator, and there was a long-forgotten spark of nostalgia there, but I guess it had dissipated.
Have a whale of a time
Here’s hoping the current iOS remake of the sixth game, Prince of the Yolkfolk, which completely passed me by at the time of its release, can do something to recapture the magic.
Well, that’s two reviews on a game series about eggs, and I tried my darndest not to make any egg-themed puns. It was pretty tough going, but I think I cracked it... ®
Antique Code Show is published every two weeks on Wednesdays
Developer The Oliver Twins, Big Red Software
Publisher Codemasters
Year of release 1986
Platforms ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Amiga, PC, Sega Mega Drive, Atari ST
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Dizzy: the Ultimate Cartoon Adventure Part Deux
COMMENTS
Best game I ever played on CPC was Sorcery, closely followed by Knightlore. PS Anyone want to buy issue 1 of Amstrad Action?
Technological pedant says...
The 6845 is pretty much just an address generator (though for completeness, it also generates sync and a hardware cursor); it's up to other components to figure out what to do with the address. The CPC swaps some of the bits around to give linear scan lines — a huge improvement on the BBC — fetches the byte and applies the current entries from its three-levels-per-channel 27 colour palette — also a huge improvement on the BBC.
So, technically, the 6845 isn't the cause of the CPC's superior colour handling.
Others are from the spectrum version, you can tell from the horrible colour attribute bleeding and simplified border to try to avoid it. The CPC's video chip was the far more capable 6845 which it shared with the BBC Micro.
Fantasy World Dizzy
Loved this one (played the PC version). Completed it multiple times, although I was never aware of that cowpat cheat.
However... I could never find the 30th bastarding coin. Collected 29 coins, and one more was marked on the map on the old oak tree screen, but could never figure out how to get it. I suspect it was a bug with the PC version.
Doubt I'd have the patience for such a relentlessly pixel-perfect-movement punishing game nowadays.
Particularly noteworthy...
The noteworthy thing about these three is that I believe they're all parts of the NES release "The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy". It had multiple worlds, and a the end of one, Dizzy was made to walk the plank by a pirate, and had to escape from the sea by jumping on bubbles. I don't know what the reason was for the Toobin' clone stage (that became Dizzy Down the Rapids).
