Fantastic Dizzy is the first incarnation of Code Masters' egg-type hero to appear on the Mega Drive, but I doubt if it'll be the last. Why? Well, a character doesn't sell three million games without having something going for him, and in Dizzy's case it's a timeless game engine which benefits all the more on the MD from never having been used by anyone else (that I can think of off the top of my head).

So what's this timeless game engine all about, you might be wondering. I'll tell you. It's a platform game with puzzles in it. (Revolution! Storm the Winter Palace! Etc! - Several thousand overly sarcastic readers). You guide your little ovoid chum around, doing the odd bit of platform-leaping and baddie- dodging, but mainly collecting objects and manipulating them to solve abstract puzzles elsewhere in Dizzy's world. The nature of the game gives Fantastic Dizzy a very sedate pace, but it's not nearly as dull as you might expect - the simplistically cutesy graphics and the charmingly chirpy music lend the game a sweet, relaxed atmosphere that's a real relief after a day of hurtling around manically in Global Gladiators or Sonic 2, and you feel much more involved in the game world than you do in most platformers, where the scenery is just something for you to jump on rather than something to feel involved in.

That's not to say this game's a pushover, though, far from it. After a couple of easy ones designed to get you into the swing of things (use the plank of wood to make a bridge across the spikes, give the big lump of meat to the monster to stop him eating you, that kind of thing), the puzzles quickly get really nasty, giving you the kind of mind-wracking frustration that makes for a real sense of reward when you finally solve one. Solving puzzles often opens up whole new areas of different-looking scenery too, so there's always an incentive to stick with it. 

One annoying thing, though, is that there's no save facility of any kind. While this isn't, as I've said, really an arcade game, there are still some tricky bits where it's very easy to lose one of your three lives. When all three are gone, there's no way back, and it seems pointlessly mean to force you all the way back to the start when arcade skill-testing was never supposed to be the point of the exercise.

That's pretty much it for drawbacks with Fantastic Dizzy, though. This is essentially a really sweet game that's very unlike anything you'll ever have played on the Mega Drive before, and for a machine that's (let's be honest) so lacking in varied game genres, that's a real godsend.

80 PERCENT