Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure (ZX Spectrum)

While growing up in the United States meant I was able experience and learn about the many different ways video games could be played, it took quite a while for me to learn that over in the United Kingdom there was a series of systems that had their own franchises, hits, and aesthetics not seen outside of that specific cultural bubble. The world of microcomputers was meant to bring inexpensive computing to the homes of British consumers, but it brought with it a gaming scene that didn’t really break out of Europe despite a few attempts to do so. Because of this, when the internet brought everyone together, nostalgic discussions of childhood games sometimes lead to people bringing up a series called Dizzy that barely had seen U.S. shores and even when it had it was through odd situations like the NES’s Aladdin Deck Enhancer which was a niche security bypass product that languished in legal troubles. However, that same rise of the internet would make playing old games more possible, and in my efforts to explore the world of microcomputers, it felt right to dig into that beloved series with its first game.

Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, sometimes simply called Dizzy, features a hero by the same name. An egg man with gloves, boots, and a big smiling face, Dizzy’s call to adventure is certainly a silly one. While exploring the woods one day he comes across an old slab speaking of something called the Avawiffovee Potion. His Eggfather had told him the potion was the only hope of ridding the land of… athlete’s foot, but there is an evil wizard named Zaks it can also defeat. Since the wizard has been pestering townsfolk with evil spells and petty mischief, Dizzy departs to find the ingredients listed on the slab to brew up this potion and put an end to the wizard’s dark deeds.

Dizzy’s adventure takes a bit of an odd form, it best described as an inventory-focused platformer. While jumping around and avoiding enemies is vitally important, your reason for navigating Dizzy’s interconnected world is to find items and cart them to where they’re needed. Some of it can be as a simple as requiring a key to open a gate while other items require a little bit of thought to realize how they can be implemented. There are no explanations provided when you pick up an item beyond its name, but as you travel screen to screen you can sometimes see text boxes floating in the air or negative space of the background. These text boxes, sometimes solid enough you can even bonk your head on them, are mostly used for stating the name of an area, but some give you little clues on what to do on a certain screen or instead just advertise other games made by the developers the Oliver Twins. While directly acknowledging that a screen has hollow sounding soil in a game with a digging spade might seem like it’s giving too much away, there would be no way to realize it otherwise and this certainly isn’t a game that needs to be any more difficult.

One of the first problems with trying to deliver items across the world is one given away in the title. Dizzy gets his name from his somersault jump, and while a little flourish while leaping isn’t a bad idea, the egg-shaped body of Dizzy means this causes plenty of problems. When you’re jumping around the world, if Dizzy doesn’t land squarely on his feet, he’ll need time to roll himself into a standing position, continuing forward either until he can finally come to a stop or he tosses himself into the many lethal dangers positioned around the world. If he’s jumping onto an uneven surface, which is more often than not when trying to make progress, it can even lead to situations where he just keeps rolling and rolling. Every enemy or hazard in Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure causes an instant death and you are only given three lives to start, although there are some lives scattered about but certainly not enough to counter the jumping issues. If you simply needed to recognize Dizzy’s unwieldy jump could roll him into danger then it could at least be a challenge to keep in mind, but the jumps in the game are literally pixel perfect at times, the player having to experiment in dangerous situations to learn the exact spot they need to stand to actually land where they want to be. There is no way to save progress and the item deliveries require constant traversal of a big chunk of the game’s many screens that require you to do these tight jumps again and again, the game assuring some artificial longevity since you need to nail these spot-on jumps every time at the risk of losing all your progress and starting again.

Traveling about is already made unnecessarily tedious and dangerous by Dizzy’s awful jump, but the enemies can be just as much of a nuisance as well. Birds, which look like white bats until you meet an actual bat and realize the white flying things are not the game’s take on the creature, are one of the more annoying features. The birds fly around the screen incredibly quickly and Dizzy is a bit slow before you even account for his jump that can leave you unable to control him for a bit as he rolls around. The pesky birds mean that even if you memorize the exact spot on dangerous screens you need to jump to, sometimes you’ll die because of the movement of these avian annoyances. The game does give you the bird seed early on to help kill them, but you can only carry one item at a time and that means you’ll have to carry it to anywhere you know risky birds can be to eliminate them, adding even more tiresome traversal. Other enemies and things like growing stalactites can definitely be troublesome as well and have their own items to counter them but many of them can be dealt with so long as you’re patient enough for them to get out of the way. However there can be moments you hit an unwinnable situation in Dizzy if you don’t deal with foes well. At one point near the end I attempted to emerge from a tunnel but a bird spawns right above it and would kill Dizzy any time he attempted to exit, and since that was the only way out that was the end of nearly an hour of hard work. Similarly, if you ever touch the broken part of a certain bridge the game becomes unwinnable as it collapses and you can no longer cross, despite a winning run requiring you to cross that screen tens of times and get your jump just right to avoid that trigger area.

For the most part the items you need to collect at least have a clear purpose, although where to use the Purse of Gold and why only a Sharp Diamond can be used to cut a specific rope can leave you a little confused as you try to figure out some of your inventory’s purpose. The final confrontation with the wizard Zaks practically requires the Protective Amulet on top of the potion so the second half of your adventure will be spent trying to figure out the long sequence of item uses required to finally reach it, but one thing that can be said about Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure is it does nail a sense of discovery pretty well. As you walk from screen to screen and see some new item you can pick up, your curiosity is piqued and you begin to think of how you can open up your path forward. The very opening of the game if you head leftward is actually somewhat kind, giving you little find after little find and some immediate obvious uses to start getting your head in the right space for figuring out how you’ll use the tools laying around to access new areas and items. Even the simplest and safest moments can be ruined by the need to futz with your little egg character to do things as simple as get him on an elevator right in front of him, but while replaying the game due to countless deaths to being a smidge off jumps or being harassed by birds is frustrating, it is a little fun to start making the game plan of how you’ll grab the items and use them like a sort of adventuring schedule.

Even if we were to set aside the movement issues and brutal unforgiving nature of death in this oddly billed ultimate cartoon adventure, there are moments that the game shows it’s not too creative with how to make things challenging otherwise. An underground maze section isn’t even really about figuring out your way through so much as it is walking slowly to the left to trigger an arbitrary minor change and then moving all the way to the right to see what was altered, this segment having almost nothing to do but walk in a game with too much walking back and forth already as part of more important tasks. The only danger in this segment is a small trap that pops open eventually and while it is fairly ineffective it is hard to chastise it because this portion would be far worse if there was legitimate danger added to the uneventful navigation. At least then it would have the chance of being a little thrilling rather than odd way of stretching out your acquisition of a pickax. There are a few moment where the danger feels fair like a pair of expanding bridges where you need to time your jump between them right but you have the room to roll across them after so the only concern is their current length, but then you have areas like Zaks’s castle where you need to figure out which of the stairs are solid or not with no real clear indication besides attempting to land on them to help you. For the most part, a lot of the areas in Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure would be fairly basic if robbed of their dangerous traps and foes, but the overcorrection by including so many ways to die and a hard to control hero certainly wasn’t the best way of sprucing those area designs up.

THE VERDICT: Exploring the world of Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure and figuring out how you’re going to use all the items scattered around does give the game a nice little sense of wonder as you learn how everything pieces together, but while some danger on such a quest is expected, Dizzy takes it much too far. The playable character’s jump is so bad that you often have to stand in the exact right spot when leaping forward or suffer lethal consequences as he rolls off uncontrollably for you daring to be a single step off, and with abundant erratic enemies and tight windows for success sometimes even appearing on the same screen, Game Overs arise too easily and often. Even in a winning run there is a lot of walking across the same ground again and again to cart one item at a time to their destinations, and throw in the inevitable deaths and moments where the game can become outright unwinnable for a small error and this cartoon adventure ends up more trouble than its worth.

And so, I give Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure for ZX Spectrum…

A TERRIBLE rating. Buoyed almost entirely by the “adventuring schedule” you develop as you learn where items are used and what order to grab them, Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure didn’t need to be an easy game, but its difficulty is what holds it back because it comes from the part of the game that is not enjoyable to engage with. Dizzy does not move around well despite how often he needs to do so, his jumps leading to disaster for the slightest deviation from strict expectations and some moments inevitably requiring you to die again and again until you learn the pixel the game expects you to be on when you make that jump. Throw in the less precise patterns of enemies on some screens and even once you’ve figured out the world enough to shoot for that confrontation with Zaks you might end up massacred by birds on the way unless you’ve decided after crossing 12 screens repeatedly with death always an inch away that you’ll do so again but with the bird seed needed to clear out a bird or two. It’s a game that tests your patience but the reward for passing is sometimes just finding some new annoying obstacle in the way, and even when Dizzy’s life isn’t balancing on the razor edge you get unimaginative sections like the labyrinth. The extra lives do at least give you a little lifeline provided they’re not too risky to go for, but having more deaths arise from legitimate errors or not reacting to something dangerous properly would be the better route of spicing up this adventure rather than asking the player to memorize almost every action they need to take or suffer possibly lethal consequences.

Funnily enough Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure came out the same year games like Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and Metal Gear released in Japan, a trend seeming to emerge in games that wanted to add traversing interconnected spaces and using knowledge or items obtained elsewhere to make progress. All of them stumbled at least a little bit when implementing this idea, but the sad thing is Dizzy’s problems with it mostly just come from what should have been the solved parts of the game design. Platforming wasn’t new yet Dizzy’s jump leads to so many of the problems with the adventure, and the enemies definitely didn’t need to be so lethal.  Some foes like the spiders that simply go up and down at least feel properly conceived for their role even if a rare success doesn’t absolve the game of its issues elsewhere. The item collecting adventure could have been a nifty evolution of platformers and probably a lot of the fondness for it comes from the ambition behind the design more than how well it was executed, but it does sound like Dizzy’s future games rectified some of the problems so perhaps the overseas nostalgia will make more sense the next time I adventure with the egg-shaped hero. However, after the required restarts due to small errors and the repetitiveness inherent in doing so, I’ll certainly be taking my time on picking up the next Dizzy adventure to see if that’s where the franchise’s region-specific fame comes from.