When Dizzy arrived on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad in 1987, there was no absolutely no reason not to buy it! The screenshots looked great, it was reviewing well, it was by the incredible BMX (and other) Simulator people Codemasters, and it only cost £1.99! The little egg felt great to control too, with his unique somersault jump a joy as you made your way around his puzzle-platform adventure. Before long though, the novelty wore off for me, and it became the founding member of an exclusive little club that would later also welcome Silent Hill and the first two Resident Evils, that it would take me decades to actually get, then finally really, really appreciate! Of course, on the surface you may wonder what this cartoon egg on the Spectrum has with these heavyweights of original PlayStation survival horror, but the secret to success in all of them is finding stuff and doing something with it; you won’t get far just jumping about or shooting dead things in the face. And for for me at any point up to my mid-forties, the latter is where I found most of my enjoyment in games!

Several decades later, this left me with all kinds of catching up to do (now mostly done!), and there we were at the end of 2020 when no fewer than two new official Dizzy games appeared! A very quick note on the first, a new version of 1989’s Pac-a-like, Fast Food Dizzy, which at that time was the third Dizzy game, but was actually called Fast Food rather than Fast Food Dizzy! Anyway, the new one is definitely called Fast Food Dizzy, and was released on the Nintendo Switch to showcase the FUZE games coding tool, where it’s not only free but the code is also fully editable. And if that’s not your bag, you can also buy it as part of the FUZE Player, which comes at a crazy price that makes the original Dizzy look expensive, together with no less than nineteen other FUZE-developed games and more to download for free! It plays like a very good Pac-Man clone with a few ideas of its own across its ten levels, it’s very polished, and is a lot of fun too!

A month later, a few days before Christmas, the second new Dizzy game arrived – Wonderful Dizzy. Now, this one’s been hanging around for a while and I think was originally supposed to be released as a Kickstarter stretch goal for the Spectrum Next in 2018, but that ended up being the collaborative effort and also wonderful Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. Wonderful Dizzy never went away though, and finishing it became a labour of love for original Dizzy developers (and gaming legends) The Oliver Twins, who not only eventually went on to fully design it themselves then get it made by their Crystal Kingdom friends, but also decided to  give it away free on their website, where you can either download the 128K Spectrum file and play it one way or another, or just take option two and play it right there in your browser!

Wonderful Dizzy is based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the children’s book by L Frank Baum that was interpreted as a reasonable movie if you’re under ten years old called The Wizard of Oz in 1939, then various other dreadful things since. And having said that, I look forward to the wrath of Johnny Depp’s Twitter defence league – I kid you not, go on there and post something derogatory about his even more dreadful Sweeney Todd and see what happens!!! Anyway, in Wonderful Dizzy, you’re the kind of Dorothy but in egg form, and as a fierce wind approaches, you and your pet Fluffle, Pogie, take cover in your house, but that gets torn out of the ground, chucked around in the wind then lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, one of four witches that rule the magical land of Oz where you’ve ended up. The West one isn’t happy and runs off with Pogie, so you need to rescue it and find a way home. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can probably help with that, and you’re going to be platforming and puzzling your way around Oz and his Emerald City, coming across familiar scarecrows, lions and tin men on the way – all in egg-form, of course!

This translates to classic Dizzy – discovering the map, finding clues, finding the items that relate to those clues, and gradually unravelling the story through all the other characters you meet. Even for someone like me that used to shun the merest hint of a puzzle, none of these are especially taxing – think Resident Evil 3 more than Monkey Island! The biggest puzzle is probably remembering where you might have seen something that you’ve just been told about, or then working out how to juggle your three-item inventory, meaning leaving stuff you’ve found already all over the place and remembering that too! As well as finding and using the items that progress the story, you’re going to be collecting coins too, and these are going to become important… So important that later on, you might spend nearly as long finding the one you’ve missed as playing through the rest of the game!!!

Unlike some (or maybe all?) of the earlier Dizzy games, the map is three-dimensional, so you’re not only going left and right, but into and out of the screen too. From your starting point in Munchkin Village, you’ve got the Red Brick Road to the left that’s going to lead to five – about half – of the areas in the game, then its better known Yellow sibling leads to the rest in the other direction. Actually, your very first puzzles are going to be finding stuff around Munchkin Village and using them to open the gates to the two roads. As well as Emerald City, you’re going to be exploring various castles and palaces, woods and fields, caves and harbours and various other buildings and structures. These are all multi-screen affairs, with a surprising amount of verticality in a lot of them too that is going to test your platforming skills. Dizzy himself controls better than ever, and for all that extended somersaulting animation every time you jump, you’re going to feel a surprising amount of precision to everything. Screw up a jump and fall too far and you’ll eventually end up a bit Humpty Dumpty though! There’s also a few enemies out to do you damage too, but you’ve got three lives, and fruit to replenish your health is relatively abundant (until you’re near the end and you’ve used it all up); it’s all just about the right level of challenge.

Speaking of better than ever, I can’t not talk about how Wonderful Dizzy looks for any longer! Off the top of my head, if we’re talking best-looking games on the Spectrum, you’ve got Trap Door, Exolon, R-Type, maybe Head Over Heels, definitely either of the first two screens in Olli & Lissa: The Ghost of Shilmoore Castle… And now we have to add Wonderful Dizzy to that list – it really is that good, to the point that when I first saw it, I assumed it was actually a Spectrum Next game, but no, it’s proper unsullied 128K Spectrum. It even embraces the colour clash, which is one of many knowing nods to old-school gaming you’ll come across! The amount of detail in every aspect of every screen is incredible, as is the way Dizzy moves around the world – not only in his animation, but also the way he physically belongs in it, and I really don’t want to be specific here because these deserve to be noticed fresh!

Sound effects are typically functional for the Spectrum, but I like the way they’re sparsely used, usually alerting you to something. There’s also a nice subtle sound when you jump, which I like a lot more than the continuous classic Spectrum footsteps you got in the original game! The looping music sounds great without being anything groundbreaking – it’s not massively memorable, but equally isn’t going to annoy you for the duration.

That duration for me was about four hours, including about thirty minutes looking for the final coin, as well as thirty minutes or so having a go and working it out when I downloaded it. I reckon if you went back and did it again (or aren’t as rubbish at games as me), you could at least half that once you know the lay of the land. And I enjoyed every minute of that, done in two sessions during a single day. It really is a joy to play, and even if you’re like my former-self and not massively into Dizzy or this style of game or survival horror, if you’ve ever played on a Spectrum you just need to have a go and see it in action! And at free of charge, there’s even less reason to not see it in action than its ancestor all those years ago!

You can play or download Wonderful Dizzy right here.