Spellbound Dizzy

Spellbound Dizzy or Dizzy 5 is an adventure video game, featuring the character Dizzy, released in November 1991 by Codemasters. The series was originally developed by the Oliver twins; however, they had little involvement with this title other than executive sign off — confident in leaving Big Red Software to redesign the graphics engine and design the game and puzzles.

The game is the fifth in the Dizzy series, excluding arcade spinoffs such as Kwik Snax and boasted the largest map of any Dizzy game yet at the time of release, having more than 100 screens. Consequently, it is by far longer and more difficult than any other game in the series. Еven 'instant walkthrough' would take about one and a half hours.

The gameplay is also complicated by the fact that Dizzy loses health when falling from heights (the feature was removed from subsequent games). This level of difficulty made many players cheat by using patches giving Dizzy unlimited lives.

The game also presents slightly different user interface, graphics and concepts that never occurred earlier or later in the series: an inventory with items icons, separated collection (stars) and healing (apples) items (in other games they are always '2 in 1'), hidden passages and dynamic animated set pieces (the travel tunnels, the mining cart, etc.) There are additional Dizzy animations and abilities, swimming for instance (once the player gets the flippers), eating frames, concussed frames (after falling), and so on.

The Spectrum version of the game, like all the titles since Dizzy 3, has both 48k and 128k versions packaged. The 128k version features richer graphics and animation, extended dialogue and a background music track. Besides that, the acid raindrops in it are harder to avoid due to a different animation sequence.