FANTASTIC DIZZY REVIEW - March 1994
| 'Fantastic Dizzy?' queries Stuart Campbell. 'Really Not Very Good
At All Dizzy, more like.' Well, it's not exactly Doom, is it? Fantastic Dizzy comes to the PC via a long ancestry of conversion, starting out in life on the distinctly humble NES. Inexplicably, though, it seems to have become steadily worse. On the Megadrive it was zippy, pretty and fun, with boppy sound and lovely parallaxing backgrounds which changed colour gradually throughout the game day. When it moved onto the Amiga, it grew two dirty great black borders down the side of the screen, in order to keep the screen small enough to get all the colours on. And now, on the flashiest, most capable, most expensive popular hardware format in the world, it's lost practically everything. The backgrounds are completely gone, replaced by permanent midnight darkness, the sound's scratchy and nasty, and the scrolling - hey, let's face it, you know what the scrolling's going to be like. Gameplay is similarly unsurprising - if you've seen any Dizzy game at any time in your life on any machine ever, you've seen this. The little boxing glove-clad egg dude wanders around a leafy forest (as well as a medieval-looking town, a lost mine and an underwater section in this particular episode), picking up bizarre objects and using them in even more bizarre ways to solve puzzles so bizarre it's not even funny anymore. Fantastic Dizzy also introduces a few arcade sub-games to the standard Dizzy formula, including an Operation Wolf-style shooting gallery and a tile-shuffling puzzle game where you can win extra lives and suchlike, but to largely insubstantial effect. The fact is, this was an endearing game on the other formats despite the hackneyed nature of the design, but it's so badly done on the PC that it's impossible to like. You find yourself constantly annoyed by the shoddy programming (even if, unlike me, you're not aware of exactly how much you're missing compared to other formats' versions), and thinking 'For another fiver I could get Doom instead, or X-Wing for another tenner, or...' and so on and so on and so on. Frankly, almost any game you can buy on the PC offers more tangible value for money than this, because no matter how much game there is in here, you just can't shake off the feeling of having been ripped off. Perhaps at budget price (and I meal REAL budget price, like maybe £7.99, not the £15 and up that seems to pass for 'cheap' on the PC) this might have been more or less acceptable, but there's no way anyone's going to feel they've got 30 quid's worth out of Fantastic Dizzy. Sorry if you think I've been wittering on about irrelevant other formats instead of
concentrating on the direct matter in hand in this review, by the way, but it's impossible
to treat something like this in isolation. I've said it before, but I'm afraid I'm going
to say it again - on a thousand-pound-plus format like the PC, which can manage to scroll
around astounding 3D texture-mapped environments like the ones in Doom with speed and
fluidity, there's no excuse whatsoever for making such a half-arsed and shoddy attempt at
one of the simplest platform game styles ever invented. If you make enough allowances for
this, you'll eventually discover the gameplay, and if you concentrate really intensely you
might just be able to ignore how diabolically it's been put together (it even seems to
slow down when there're more than two sprites on screen at the same time, for God's sake),
but why make yourself work so hard? Why not just buy a good game in the first place? Lows Technically dire; worse than the NES version in most respects. Verdict A huge leap backwards for cute platform puzzle games. And civilisation generally. 53 PERCENT |
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