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Haven’t we been here before? Yet again, disaster strikes the Yolkfolk and only one egg can save them. Yes, Dizzy, that all round good-egg returns in another adventure, this time in the Crystal Kingdom.
During the four sections of the game you can walk on clouds, study light engineering, ride dolphins, get lost in mazes and parachute into enemy territory – a bit like Indiana Jones but without the sex appeal. It is fun, but having only three lives with no continues does put a damper on things.

The music is catchy, and only slightly annoying, but you can choose sound effects instead which are quite good. On the down side, loading takes a long time, and when you run out of lives, the game has to reload. Having said that it is pretty big, and should last you a while, but the other Dizzy games came out for less than eight quid and there really is not enough here to justify an extra 12 gold coins.
Sarah Tanser

Verdict: 65%

No, we have not made a mistake – this is a Dizzy game and it costs 20 quid. In a slightly puzzling marketing strategy scenario, the Codies have decided that, although at first glance (and indeed second, third and all subsequent glances, but we will get to that in a moment) this looks exactly the same as the first 16-bit Dizzy game (the £4.99 Treasure Island Dizzy), it is going to cost four times as much. Actually, maybe it is not so strange – the Codies always insisted that their games were really all full-price products and that selling them for eight quid was always purely a marketing thing, so perhaps we should not be raising any eyebrows. Yeah, right. In whichever case, though, one thing IS sure to raise eyebrows in connection with Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, and that is how crap it is.
Now, as I have already said, on first impressions this is Just Another Dizzy Game. But there has been a bit of fiddling around on beneath its surface – this is a little bigger than the Diz epics we have been used to before, and it comes in four separate sections, each of which can be accessed with a password via a neat little spoof on Code Masters’ Nintendo and Sega cheating device, the Game Genie. Well, that is the theory, but a bit of a cock-up on the production front meant that the final version of the game actually forgets to give you the level two password when you complete level one. (With that in mind, I will break tradition, and give it now, as a reward for any of you, who have struggled through the first section and cannot be bothered to play it over and over again when you keep dying on level two, as well you might, for reasons I will get to in another moment – it is G5J 73Q 8HK).

That is just one of the little buggy annoyances in the game, though – in the aforementioned level two, it is only too easy to get a ride across the sea from a dolphin, leap off its back, and find yourself through a solid-looking floor and getting stuck at the top of a different screen, from which there is no way back into the game. Couple that with the lack of a level two password, of course, and you will get very angry with this very quickly.

Also, it could just be my imagination, but I am sure the other Dizzy games did not make you traipse backwards and forwards shuffling objects around tediously nearly as much as this does, especially in level three where it gets quite fantastically nasty-minded about things.

I have kind of run out of space here, and there is lots more I would have liked to mention (like paying 20 quid for a game and still having to put up with flick screens and a choice between average music OR fearsomely crap sound effects), but let us just say I am one of Dizzy’s biggest fans, but I hate this game with all my heart.
STUART CAMPBELL