Spellbound Dizzy

Spellbound Dizzy or Dizzy 5 is an adventure video game, featuring the character Dizzy, released in November 1991 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.

Spellbound Dizzy
Cover art
Developer(s)Big Red Software
Publisher(s)Codemasters
Composer(s)Allister Brimble (Amiga, C64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum)
SeriesDizzy
Platform(s)Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, CD32
Release
  • EU: November 11, 1991
Genre(s)Adventure
Mode(s)Single-player

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.

The Spectrum version of the game, like all the titles since Dizzy 3, has both 48k and 128k versions packaged. The 128k version features richer graphics and animation, extended dialogue and a background music track. Besides that, the acid raindrops in it are harder to avoid due to a different animation sequence.

Plot

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!

Spellbound Dizzy Lite

The release of the Commodore 64 version of Dizzy's Excellent Adventures (a compilation featuring five games) comes with a uniquely different, and significantly reduced version of the game,[2] complete with many bugs. The complete version of the game was later released for the computer. The release for other platforms is the same in both releases.

Reception

The ZX Spectrum version was voted number 18 in the Your Sinclair Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time.[3]

References
  1. Instant walkthrough playlist
  2. "Spellbound Dizzy Lite gameplay video".
  3. "Readers' Top 100 Games of All Time". Your Sinclair. September 1993.
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