OG & ZZT - Fantasy World Dizzy

Описание: ♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (4:00) “Fantasy World Dizzy” by The Oliver Twins (1989/1991)
• (1:15:51) “Fantasy World Dizzy” by Zenith Nadir (2000) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/diz...]

Our final OG & ZZT for the year, this time takes us across the pond to check out that egg all us Americans love to dunk on, Dizzy.

With its perilous platforming, limited inventory, and complete lack of saving your progress, people are always down on this series as obtuse awful and a sign that the British are unwell. Well, I'm here to say that only one of those things is true.

While certainly not an easy game, I was really having a lot of fun with it. Each screen is its own challenge, with little room for error due to your limited lives. This gives the game some real impact. Finding out how to get past or bird, or getting the timing down for bouncing on a moat alligator's snout makes each success feel like a real triumph. As you get better, the stakes feel higher. You certainly don't want to die getting past the angry bird when you've done so many times before. You need that life to experiment with timing or trying to use an item to solve a problem.

Really it's pretty good. Very methodical, and that makes it harder to approach now as you're going to be dumping water on the dungeon's fireplace to escape and making the same jumps to get the same early game items again and again. It's meant to last you long enough that it will be worth the allowance money spent. Part of me wouldn't say no to being able to save in the central castle, but I see and repsect the vision.

And then we revisit Nadir's ZZT adaptation of the game. Here all the platforming to get around the world is stripped out in favor of ZZT's usual free-roaming player and the inventory limit is expanded, so you don't need to juggle items anymore. The game transforms into a chill adventure of Dizzy exploring a castle and its surroundings, able to save on demand and indulge in the player's curiosity freely. This game was many ZZTers' first encounter with Dizzy and it set a very different tone for the series. It's far more casual and easy to get through, but after holding my breath as I made certain jumps in the original, the empty backtracking in this one feels much more tedious.

Expect a lot of holding down an arrow key to cross 3-5 boards to use a newly acquired item somewhere, while muttering swears every time you bump into Nadir's bits of decorative shading and detail in the grass that can't be walked on.

The ZZT game also suffers at the end where to properly reach the ending you need to collect all the game's hidden gems. In the original, I assume you need to collect all the not as hidden coins just the same, but there they serve as extra challenges to undertake. Here, you need to do absurd things like touch specific walls 3 times. Many of the hidden gems have some slight indicator, and I've played the game enough times to remember where plenty of them are. Even so, the finale to this one consisted of using a walkthrough and jumping from board to board to show off how asinine some of them are.

Both games are a lot of fun, with the ZZT trilogy of Dizzy conversions being the most approachable, if a bit nap-inducing. Dizzy is a good egg.

♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/diz...
♦ Originally streamed on December 26th, 2025 ♦

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