Daniel Keast

This is the fourth Dizzy adventure, and the first that wasn’t created by the original developers, The Oliver Twins. This one introduces a health bar, you no longer die instantly when touching hazards. The coins from the previous games have been replaced by diamonds, and they restore some of your health when you collect them. Other than that this game is very similar to the previous entry. Perhaps it is because of the hand-off to a new developer, maybe they didn’t feel like they could take any large risks. Maybe it’s just that the series had found its footing in the previous game and there were no major issues to fix like the snorkel in 2, or the backtracking in the original.

Dune is a classic science fiction book from 1965. It tells the story of Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto. Their family is taking control of the planet Arrakis near the start of the novel. The Emperor has made an arrangement with Baron Harkonnen, who currently rules the planet, to hand it over. It is clear to everyone involved that this is a trap, and that they cannot be trusted. The opportunity is too great to pass up, however, and the first section of the book details the training that Paul receives and the planning for the move.

This is the third adventure game in the Dizzy series, and one of my favourite games growing up. I loved the feel of this adventure, of exploring what felt like a huge world filled with dragons and trolls.

The second Dizzy adventure game is themed around Treasure Island. In this one you start on an island with hidden treasure everywhere, and must solve puzzles including giving several pieces of this treasure to a shopkeeper to obtain a boat which you can use to leave.

This is a SNES RPG by Square from 1995, although it didn’t actually get a release here in the UK. I used to read Super Play magazine each month, and that had regular sections about import games, and in particular Japanese RPGs. I didn’t even know what they were at the time, but the images in the magazine, and the way they talked about them captivated me. I don’t think this game was released here until it was ported to the Nintendo DS in 2009, but I had already completed it by then. This is because around the turn of the millennium I discovered emulation, and played through many of the games I was never able to buy while sitting at the family PC. Despite playing this with a keyboard I loved it.

This novel tells the story of two children who are left to fend for themselves in a world that is hostile to their existence. They have a mother, but she is covering shifts for her ill sister in a hotel for very rich people. They are being looked after by Leif, who is their Mum’s boyfriend. When they return home from a visit to see her, the house is circled by a line of red paint. They all climb into their camper van and sleep in a supermarket car park, but then the camper van is also encircled. Leif gives the children some money, and tins of food, leaves them in an abandoned house and claims he is going to return with their Mother.

I first heard about this book on The News Agents podcast, and then saw the author being interviewed by Gary Stevenson on YouTube. I’d read Gary’s book, The Trading Game, last year and have watched his videos occasionally since.

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 a 2025 dystopian novel by Laila Lalami. In it the main character, Sara Hussein, is detained in a facility for the rehabilitation of people who have committed no crimes but are predicted by the state to do so in the future. It starts after she has already been detained and her stay has been extended multiple times for the slightest of infractions of a large book of rules.

This is the first 2D Super Mario Bros. game for a very long time, the last one being New Super Mario Bros. U on the Wii U from 2012. I can’t believe it’s been 11 years since that game was released. I felt that series lacked a lot of the character of the originals. The artwork felt quite flat, and each game looked similar to the last one. At first I thought this one was just the same thing again but actually, as I played it, lots of little details stood out in the animation. The way Mario looks and moves in this one is actually reminiscent of the artwork from the 1980s. He looks a lot like he did on the old handheld Game and Watch games.

When I played Yakuza Kiwami 2 I said “I’m definitely not going to leave it as long to play Yakuza 3”. That was a year and three months ago! It’s technically true though, I did try to play Yakuza 3 remastered quite a while ago but found it a real slog. The games I had played leading up to this one were the “Kiwami” remakes in a new engine. Yakuza 3 was the first game I played in its original form. The fighting was very frustrating, lacking the depth of the previous entries I had played. All the enemies seemed to block every attack without much opportunity to do anything about it as well. Recently Sega released this version, a proper ground-up remake of 3.

This is a short dystopian novel from Sweden, originally released in Swedish in

1. It begins with the protagonist, Leo Kall, explaining how he is in a prison and separated from his wife and family. He begins to detail his life leading up to this moment, and in particular his discovery of a drug which acts as an effective truth serum. The drug is named after him, and is the title of the book: Kallocain.

Now we have a working camera, and triangles are drawn from the most distant to the nearest. We’re getting very close to a complete renderer. The main issue remaining is that when we walk into one of the cubes, everything goes haywire. This is down to the division by z in the projection function. If z is 0, then the max value is returned, and we get odd results. If z is negative, then we get warped triangles and inverted rendering. What we need to do is detect when triangles are too close to the screen, or are behind the camera and skip rendering them.

So now we have a working camera, we can move around and look at objects that are moving independently from us. There are two obvious issues remaining though, firstly, no matter which direction we look at the cubes the same one is always drawn in front. The other is corruption when we walk into them. I’m going to fix the first one now.

As of the last post in this series we had a textured floating cube in space. You could rotate it, move it and zoom in and out. That rotation and movement was performed directly on the cube, with the camera effectively staying in place looking down the z axis. This falls apart as soon as there are multiple objects. We want to be able to move around looking at things from different perspectives. First we need to move and rotate objects in the world, and then we need to be able to move the camera and look at things without them interfering with each other.