Dizzy 1: `Talkthrough`

Yey, thanks! That's both my maps now. I can totally get on with the talkthrough whatever happens with WOS though I want that to remain. I saw that last map you posted too but I never used that. I also got the impression that World Of Spectrum once had a map they no longer do.

Dizzy is now anxious. Having added the first ingredient to the cauldron it now seem very apparent he will need to get past the spooky critter in the haunted chimney for which he will need the ghost hunter's laser. In this run though however Dizzy is patient/timid and has no need to jump on the ghost thus losing his tool but can wait for it to come to him. Bump, ghost go poof! Now Dizzy can jump the chasm... and immediate crash into an impassable living spider. The ghost hunter's laser is no good here so the spider neatly blocks Dizzy's path to "A Miner's Hard Hat". Simply little puzzle isn't it? We need to pass the spider, but we can't. Not that we need the hard hat down this mine. Logically there, illogically unneeded here.

However the chimney is now clear so we can descend on the elevator and go into the next room which contains a large trunk I think Dizzy can stand on, an elevated rock I now Dizzy can stand on and, according to map B but not map A a bat. These bats are getting a little troublesome I think I may need something to deal with them. I'm also curious about the positioning of that rock, I may return to that later.

Boy these miners haven't done a very good job. Having dropped down a large hole in the ground and crossed a rather large underground stream by means of a very strange bridge that only seems half there Dizzy has discovered "A Purse Of Gold" one of them has carelessly left behind.

This map is actually so misleading I don't need what I thought I did and have remembered what was causing the discrepancy with the bat (screen merging) so I didn't need what I thought I needed. All the same I do need this purse of gold and I'd best get it out of this mine.

Maybe I didn't think this all the way through before writing it. Anyway now we've got the gold we can tie off a loose end or two. We can now return to the hermit's rickety old shack situated in scene twenty which we visited before but were unable to pay him. We now can pay him although I think he gets the better end of the deal, although the amount of money you give him may be why he'll now winch you up for the rest of the game... you still can't stand where the spider is though, are those meant to be people staring out the windows?

Anyway you can now visit his treehouse, but apparently not enter, and in one of the more random puzzles in the game jump up and the other end and headbutt a cloud which will fall and Dizzy can claim and take and add to the witch's cauldron. The second stage of potion making is now complete.

Or Dizzy's New Beginning.

Due to an error on my second map, which I transferred to this talkthough, I failed to give this screen it's correct name last time I came here. Not inappropriately, however, for at that time I could go no further. This time however Dizzy bring The Graveyard Key and unlocks the entrance, the Dizzy End sign doesn't become solid now though so you still have two raindrops that Dizzy can't reach; honestly what's the point.

I'm starting to think that the clue at the beginning of the game is simply to give Dizzy access to the key so he can get into the graveyard and I should have brought us here a lot sooner. Anyway we can go in now and thus visit our first new screens for three updates.

The gold being left behind strengthens my theory of Zak's causing the rushed abandonment of the mines. That bridge has probably degraded over time, and the electronics (or magic) behind it are not working properly causing it to randomly change like it does.

The graveyard should be opened quite early on, in order to get an item from there (which I won't spoil) and that enables you to get past various obstacles and to another obstacle removing item. So yes I agree you are late to the party.

I think the cloud having 2 inaccessible drops is for asthetics. It would look strange with just the one falling.

My guess would be that the cloud was not originally over the gate and it got moved to the right (maybe to make room for the text box) or the gate was moved to the left (maybe the door was drawn from the side and they were worried people wouldn't recognize it as a door so they redesigned it) and they just didn't bother removing the useless drops.

I don't doubt Zaks causing the abandonment of the mine but gold doesn't come in purses naturally and purses are designed to be easily carried. Plus this part of the mine is rather out of the way so it doesn't seem like somewhere anyone would carelessly come. I'd have to guess abandonment or not this purse was absent mindedly lost rather than carelessly abandoned.

I agree on the item the thing is that there is another item just beyond the graveyard which I'm trying to avoid getting thus far (though we are now about to get it) due to the logic I'm following in playing the game.

I certainly don't think the cloud having two drops is for aesthetics, the way the clouds work is that they lose raindrops as Dizzy despatches them so most of the have one drop at least briefly at some point in the game. I'm more inclined to go with SnTrooper while all the time trying to remember what the Oliver Twins said in their astonishingly poor playthrough about how much they had to think about things to do to find memory to do what they wanted. I'm surprised the kept this cloud in the game, it doesn't seem necessary and if you played the game the way I'm now imagining playing game it's left, grease mine cart enter mine and get key, right all the way to graveyard entrance, get blocked by raindrops, left all the way back to mine, to haunted chimney, get raincoat, right all the way back to graveyard despatch raindrops put down raincoat, get key unlock graveyard, phew! That's a long day.

I have actually read, I think, that someone has actually got all but one raindrop in this game so can I ask if it is possible, in this scene to jump up and somehow leave the raincoat on top of the entrance event though Dizzy can't stand there) so it can despatch the last one? I find it hard to imagine they didn't bother to remove useless drops though when they did bother to make the sign a background graphic.

A none too subtle hint here slightly butchering the poem in order to tell the player what they need to do. Which is basically to take the gleaming emerald found all the way in the south (presumably this is north) and stick it in the eye of the idol statue. The player does have to understand that emeralds are green or may miss the reference.

Dizzy can then drop down the hole that opens in the ground but we don't need to do this now. So instead of the green gem we need the yellow dust, so we can dust off those annoying aviators flying around. Having done that we can proceed to the right.

The thing about Dizzy that the graveyard most shows is how quickly the story developed. The Oliver Twins have been quick to point out that Dizzy was not conceived as an egg. He became an egg because they drew an oval (which are easy to draw apparently) and other people saw an egg. Nevertheless by the time them came to designing this point in the game he, and his kin, were all eggs, as can be shown by the number of them who engrave "RIP Egg Yolk" on these headstones.

Or there's a statue of one anyway. In the Commodore version this says 'guards' apparently which makes more sense but isn't what the poem says. Though to be honest none of this makes sense. The grave in question is a trapdoor: why on earth? Why for the benefit of the puzzle but that's pretty strange. There's also a couple of birds and, according to the sketch map, another ghost. Pah, there's no ghost here, not an obvious one anyway though it would be nice if there was. Maybe someone should sweep the area with that laser. Oh, speaking of which.

While there is no ghost here there is a "Can Of Insecticide" that we get rather late in the day. Methinks that, to be more logical the ghost hunter's laser should be here and the can of insecticide should be in the mine where the laser is and where it would be more immediately useful. There are a lot of things in this game that would be more logically placed elsewhere. What seems to have happened is that the Oliver Twins appear to have decided that in the early stages of the game they will encourage the player by giving them immediate solutions to puzzles than logical positions. Otherwise they might be put off by having to trudge all over the map before making any progress.

Which is apparently infested with one unkillable shark. Not that that mattered as there's currently nowhere to go if you could kill it and water is uncrossable for Dizzy any. Maybe it's because he's making a potion, he partially qualifies as a witch.

Before you come here you might want to take the insecticide around and kill all the spiders loitering around. There's also one here... and a third ghost according to the dubious map. Unless there's a second version of the game which is thus far undiscovered by most players. Anyway while your here you need to pick up the "Vampire Dux Feather" (whatever Dux is, it may or may not be a pun). I wonder what would happen if you brought the feather in contact with... ah, ah, ah... not yet. The next thing to actually do is to put this feather in the pot, as ingredient three it's why we delayed coming to the graveyard sooner. Wow, we're quite close to close of play now.

I think Vampire Dux feather, and the entire premise of the game really in getting ingredients for a potion, was inspired by the "Four Tasks of Dangermouse" arc from the UK TV cartoon "Dangermouse". One of the ingredients was feathers from a vampire duck (Count Duckula). Well worth finding and watching, and incidentally they are rebooting the series this year too.

I never considered the reason Dizzy was hydrophobic was because he was a witch. Makes sense though.

I reckon that the reason Dizzy doesn't like water is because fresh eggs sink in water, and only bad eggs float. So if he goes in the water, its a no win situation - he either sinks and drowns, or he floats and then Daisy will dump him as he is bad!

Ah, I was thinking 'Count Duckula' as the only vampire duck I know of but at the same time that spelling is very strange, though it may have been spelled like that in the Danger Mouse episode you mention with I know exists but can barely recall.

Both ideas to explain Dizzy's hydrophobia seem pretty good. Though, obviously, there are bigger considerations if Dizzy is a bad egg. Dizzy is obviously a good egg. He's also a witch in this story, the witch angle however works better for explaining his aversion to water droplets which obviously aren't connected to whether he can float or not.

Dizzy floats to the top of the water when he dies in it in all the later games, so he must be a bad egg.

But he has to sink first, so maybe the water makes him go bad?

I thought I'd seen that happen in other Dizzy games. The logic may be that dying in the game is bad so dead Dizzy = bad Dizzy. It's also presumably true that even if left at the bottom of the water Dizzy will go bad and float up eventually.

You remember we left that crowbar behind earlier in the game? Well, now we need to go get it, and we need to open and enter the trapdoor below that spider we should have now killed. And we need to enter that very tired scene we came to earlier in order to gain access at the top, it's no less tired from this end.

The next screen we also entered from below earlier, we need our raincoat now because there are three random drops of (presumably) ice cold water dropping down from above with aren't good for Dizzy, there's also an extra life for if you come a cropper, unfortunately you have to pass to dips in order to reach it and three to reach your goal in the next scene. In the meantime, we go left once more.

And not much more exciting now, because one way or another we have to ditch the raincoat before we can pick up "A Clove Of Garlic" which is what Dizzy came for so he can go off and slay all the bats he's about to come across, and maybe the vampire dux feather if he's not too careful and brings them into contact.