| Spellbound Dizzy | |
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Cover art |
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| Developer(s) | Codemasters |
| Publisher(s) | Codemasters |
| Designer(s) | Big Red Software |
| Platform(s) | Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, CD32 |
| Release date(s) |
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| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Spellbound Dizzy is an adventure video game, featuring the character Dizzy, released in December 1990 by Codemasters. The series was originally developed by the Oliver twins; however, they had little involvement with this title other than executive sign off — confident in leaving Big Red Software to redesign the graphics engine and design the game and puzzles.
The game is the fifth in the Dizzy series, excluding arcade spinoffs such as Kwik Snax and boasted the largest map of any Dizzy game yet at the time of release, having more than 100 screens. Consequently, it is by far longer and more difficult than any other game in the series. Еven 'instant walkthrough' would take about one and a half hours [1].
The gameplay is also complicated by the fact that Dizzy loses health when falling from heights (the feature was removed from subsequent games). This level of difficulty made many players cheat by using patches giving Dizzy unlimited lives.
The game also presents slightly different user interface, graphics and concepts that never occurred earlier or later in the series: an inventory with items icons, separated collection (stars) and healing (apples) items (in other games they are always '2 in 1'), hidden passages and dynamic animated set pieces (the travel tunnels, the mining cart, etc.) There are additional Dizzy animations and abilities, swimming for instance (once the player gets the flippers), eating frames, concussed frames (after falling), and so on.
Dizzy's been visiting his local friendly Wizard Theo. Now Theo, who may be a dab hand in the waving of wands area, is not much cop at the filing-things-away-neatly department, and he's left his Book of Really Powerful Spells lying round in his laboratory. What's more, the book's been left open at the page headed A Really, Really, Powerful Spell (That Shouldn't Be Read Out Loud). Whether Dizzy actually read the heading is not known but — yikes! — he said the spell and it's caused a catastrophe — Dizzy's spirited all his Yolk Folk chums and Wizard Theo into the underworld! Cripes! There's only one course of action open to the brave little hero — read the spell again and spirit himself into the underworld to save his rotund group of pals!
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