This is a game I played a lot as a child. I had several of the main Dizzy games on the spectrum, and loved every one of them. I played Wonderful Dizzy four years ago and ended up creating a screenshot walkthrough of the whole game. I won’t be doing that for the rest of the series. That was a lot of work and this site has become more about my thoughts on completion of things.
This is the very first game in the Dizzy series, released in 1987 for the ZX Spectrum. It was created by the Oliver Twins, and published by Codemasters. The game is a flick screen platformer. You explore a world collecting items and solving puzzles. Dizzy has a very unique jump where he spins around, and can end up tumbling down slopes when he lands. A significant part of the game is figuring out how to traverse the environment. It is quite easy to end up jumping or rolling into a hazard and losing a life. Most of these are really fun to figure out, you build up a good sense of Dizzy’s moves and behaviour. There are a couple though, which are very unfair. One bridge in particular which you have to cross several times in the game will collapse if you walk all the way across it, and if you do, that is essentially game over. You cannot get out again, and must lose all your lives.
You have to create a potion to destroy the evil wizard Zaks. That means collecting the ingredients into a bottle and mixing them on a cauldron which has been lit. The items are scattered all over the world, as are various others to destroy obstacles and enemies. Dizzy can only carry a single item at a time in this game, which means there is a lot of backtracking to ferry the different items around.
I was surprised how much I could remember of this game since it has been so long. It obviously had an effect on me. In a way this series has similar mechanics to Metroidvania games, with you slowly gaining more and more access to a map. It also has echoes of the LucasArts point and click adventures.
This game is really missing a lot of the upgrades that came in later entries in the series. An inventory, other characters you can talk to, a health bar were all added in the next few games. I still enjoyed it very much though, and now I’ve written up the very first and very last here I think I’d better fill in the gap between.