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%.