Physically Impossible Dizzy

[davidn]

I was playing a couple of the Dizzy games last night with rakarr looking on and providing much-needed help and encouragement - I hadn't realized that Treasure Island Dizzy and Spellbound Dizzy existed on the Amiga but hadn't made it to the PC, and so it was like discovering completely new Dizzy games after all this time between the 386 era and now.

Unfortunately, after said amount of time, I have to admit that the series is showing a few cracks in the shell of nostalgia where they had previously been so safe. I decided to give up on Treasure Island Dizzy quite early on - a game in which you have one life and instant death around every turn and in the form of every off-screen cage that can come down and trap you - and instead turned my attention to Spellbound Dizzy.



The first thing I noticed is that it's got quite an unusual graphical style, with a black-eyed Dizzy who is animated in a bit more of a camp manner than the other games - though his boxing gloves and vacant smile are still intact.

The second thing I noticed was that for reasons best known to themselves, the people who laid out this game decided to base the above-ground section largely on adding to your weight so that you can go down a big hole with an updraft in it - this involves ferrying big rocks back and forward across a couple of screens. There's a quarry with an infinite supply a few screens to the left of the hole you need to get down...



Unfortunately, there's an obstacle in the way between these two places - it's a big pit, shown in this doubly wide screenshot. A trampette is provided to get out of it, but you can't put it in a position where you can reach both sides without moving it.



So, then, to sum up the situation...

• At the start of the game, you have two inventory spaces.
• You require two rocks to weigh yourself down the hole against the updraft.
• The trampette at the bottom of the pit (between the quarry and the hole) has to be moved back and forth to allow you to bounce up the sides of the pit every single blasted time - this requires a free inventory space
• Rocks can always be picked up from the quarry, but they shatter when you drop them on the ground

In this situation, how do you get two rocks over to the hole on the other side of the pit from the quarry? You can't take two at once - the trampette-moving kerfuffle takes care of that - and as soon as you drop one on the ground, it shatters and can't be picked up.

If you said to try putting them on the grass, it was a good guess but wrong.



If, however, your suggestion was to put the rock down on a cloud to safely store it while you were off getting a second one (a cloud which, I must stress, doesn't hold Dizzy for too long before he drops right through it) then congratulations - you have solved the puzzle and also suffer from the same mental imbalance as the makers of this game.

I stumbled across this... extraordinary solution by accident, in desperation. The rest of the game isn't exactly awful, but the rock-ferrying (which increases to the need for four rocks later on, though you have more inventory space) is an astonishingly tedious thing to put in - I was very glad that I had the chance to increase emulation speed to 200%.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Well that's ... something. (Knowing full well that I had no chance of solving this because I wasn't familiar enough with game mechanics even after your explanation and had no way of testing things, my wild-guess was to drop the first stone in the updraft itself. It only shatters if it hits the ground, and one can't be heavier than the updraft if you need two plus your own body weight to descend, so maybe it can just levitate while you get the other one! But of course not.)

The only other example of a game I can think of with such an inexcusable example of front-loading an awful puzzle is The Longest Journey, which is one of the finest games ever made, something I firmly believe that absolutely everyone should play, but there is one puzzle very early on in chapter 1 (involving using an inflatable raft to retrieve a key) that is ... bad. In fact, slither, who is about as evangelical about this game as I am, has a habit of distributing it with a text file that just flat-out walks through the solution of that one puzzle and then goes on a lengthy speech about how you should please not judge the game by that, it's just one stupid puzzle in the beginning but he swears it gets so much better, etc. (I am inclined to agree.)

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I have yet to actually play this game despite borrowing it from a friend. Maybe I should get to it!

[kjorteo]

Maybe you should! Aside from starting with one of the stupidest puzzles ever, once you get over that, it's really clever, the characters are fantastic (especially ... well, once you get far enough to meet a certain one, that character alone pushes it into "one of the greatest games ever made" territory,) and the plot is amazingly compelling. The writing is something that (to this day!) I regularly cite as possibly the greatest example I've ever seen of presenting a world and bringing the readers/players/viewers/whatever up to speed about said world without resorting to cheap info-dumps or tedious exposition or codex entries at all, and of dialogue that's extremely natural and readable as a result because there's no "That's the north wall of the academy. As you know, voice in my own head whom I am addressing in response to the 'look at wall' command, the academy was built twenty years ago...." whatsoever.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Okay, so basically, Dizzy is an Earth Pony or Unicorn, and rocks are Pegasi.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned, I think the idea of the rock puzzle was clever, it was just the execution that was obtuse and monotonous.

Having a lot of the puzzles involve going gradually lower in the shaft with the updraft, and gradually having to find out how to get more and more rocks over there, was interesting, but having to do that bit with the trampoline over and over was a pain even on 200% speed - I'd have shortened the puzzle by just making you need to carry a protective item (like rubber boots to deal with a poisoned swamp or something) back and forth. And there was a lot of bouncing in this instalment...

Once we gleaned from the terrible, terrible guide that you needed two rocks at once, and made the leap that you needed to find a soft place to store one, figuring out you had to use the clouds wasn't too bad. It was counter-intuitive to a degree, but we both hit on it at once - I was just about to suggest it, when you announced it. The room name "Soft, Fluffy Clouds" helped. Still, that trampoline puzzle didn't exactly reward experimentation, because rather than place them gently like a normal person, Dizzy apparently throws down rocks with such a furious rage (unmatched even by denied toddlers) that they'll shatter even against the softest of surfaces, so you have to go back and get another...
And then you could place them on the cold metal scales just fine? That was welcome, but strange.

And then when you weren't ferrying rocks around you were having to backtrack to grab the items you left behind in order to carry the rocks, so you could then take the items somewhere that you needed to go and get more rocks in order to access... that one puzzle really took over the entire game.

And when you finally started to get the hang of it, it decided the idea of Dizzy in swimwear was so terrible that it had to freeze rather than attempt to cope with it. Actually, I don't think I blame it for that one.

But here's to Camp Dizzy, and your impression, in voicing him, of whoever you said which ended up sounding like John Inman from Are You Being Served.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

What about the rest of Pac-Man 2?? :O

[xaq.livejournal.com]

While I congratulate David...and indeed, all of us, really...for surviving the psychological avalanche that was Bad Boy's Love, there's only so much bullshit one mind can take. :b

[aristophains.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend Knightmare Dizzy (http://www.yolkfolk.com/dizzyage/dz033.html).

[davidn]

I very vaguely remember this...! I'm going through it again now - I can't remember how far I got last time. The size is impressive, and he really has Treguard's tone of voice in the dialogue boxes :)