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Who would have thought it, eh? The little blobby white character who came into existence because he was easy to draw and did not present too much of a problem to the old Spectrum’s extremely limited colour palette is now one of the country’s biggest video game stars. As well as racking up huge sales on all the 8-bit and 16-bit home computer formats, Dizzy has been spotted on the NES and recently made his debut on the Mega Drive. In fact, he made his debut in this very game, which is the first-ever Dizzy game to be converted back to a floppy disk format, as well as the first one to feature proper scrolling instead of just flicking from screen to screen. Pretty interesting stuff so far, huh?
HURRY UP
Yeah, alright. I will just get on with it, shall I? Fantastic Dizzy is the biggest Dizzy game yet, and consequently comes with the biggest price tag. This is immediately worrying – the last time the Codies tried to push the little egg dude into the grown-up games world, the result was the dire Crystal Kingdom outing, which was three times the price of its predecessors but not even a third as good. This time, though, they have tried a bit harder. There is proper scrolling, parallax backdrops in 32 colours (apparently), a neat daytime-nighttime-daytime effect huge black borders down either side of the screen, jaunty music, cute – hang on a minute. Rewind! ‘Huge black borders down either side of the screen’? What is going on here, then? Well, seemingly, the only way to reproduce the pretty backdrops and colours of the Mega Drive version was to make the action take place on a squidged-up screen that is like watching a Cinemascope movie on a 14" portable TV. I do not know the technical difficulties which may have been involved, but frankly I would rather have had less colours in the backdrop and a main screen which did not fill me with claustrophobic terror every time I tried to play the game.

BUSINESS
Anywaym otherwise it is pretty much Dizzy business as usual, except with a few little arcade subgames thrown in to make things more interesting. There is tile-sliding, mine-cart riding, Operation Wolf-style shooting galleries and more.

Fantastic Dizzy is a game which will entertain you for a long time. It is better progarmmed than Crystal Kingdom, less annoyingly laid-out, and the puzzles are just a (tiny) bit more logical than before. For me, the Dizzy games have always created a more successfully ‘believable’ fantasy world atmosphere than most videogames, and that is something I will forgive a lot of sins for. Even those huge and ridiculous borders down either side of the screen.
STUART CAMPBELL

Paul McCartney wrote a song about eggs once. It started with the immortal lines "Scrambled eggs/ oh my darling, how I love your legs," but then he ruined it by sticking in a string quartet and calling it Yesterday. Oh, and he made an album called Back to the Egg which was complete crap.
But Codemasters’ latest eggy adventure is far more inspiring. It combines the best of all Dizzy’s previous outings and sticks them into one big integrated package complete with sub-games, slinky scrolling and great-looking graphics.

Daisy has been kidnapped by evil Wizard Zak and all Dizyy’s friends have been turned into fiends by a magic spell, so you have to zip around the levels, righting wrongs, collecting goodies and solving puzzles in the Tree Village, Graveyard and Diamond Mines among others. It is all tremendous fun, especially the Indiana Jones-style train section, but it can also be frustrating – you have only got three lives and Dizzy’s leaping is not always as agile as you would have like. Despite this, Fantastic Dizzy is by far the most accomplished version of the little egg’s adventures and well worth further investigation.
Rob Mead