The One


Dizzy: Prince Of The Yolkfolk
By Codemasters
Amiga 500

 
Published in The One #50

Dizzy: Prince Of The Yolkfolk

Cheapos' favourite spherical star is back! Yes, Dizzy, the original budget-sized hero, returns in the latest egg-tastic release from the Codemasters' games factory.

The story is fairly predictable but I'll run through it briefly for you anyway, just so that you know. Whilst out collecting cherries for Grand Dizzy's surprise cherry pie, Dizzy and Daisy stumble across a mysterious castle which they both decide to explore. Then, tragedy. Daisy pricks herself on a mystic spinning wheel and falls into a deep, deep sleep. Before Dizzy has a chance to do anything to help her, Rockwart the Troll catches him and locks our young eggy friend in a dank, dark cave.

Dizzy's got quite a task on his hands in this arcade adventure (although the initial cave situation doesn't exactly require a lot of deep thought - what else can you do when you're stuck in one location behind a wooden door with some leaves, a match and bucket of water? It's obvious - just place the leaves in the bucket and set fire to your bottom, of course). The majority of the later puzzles are similarly straightforward and you'll often know where to use the items you pick up along the way without any problem.

Dizzy: Prince Of The Yolkfolk

As for the 'arcade' part of the game, well, a few of the locations require some frustratingly pixel-perfect leaping and I can't help thinking that the game would have been slightly improved if jumping was initiated by pressing fire instead of pushing up on the joystick. That's just a tiny niggle, though, as most of the time the landscape is easily negotiated.

The Prince of the Yolkfolk is a pleasant enough game with bold, colourful sprites and lovely colouring-book backdrops. It sounds fairly nice too, and the whole game is generally fine in an unsurprising way. I say unsurprising because this is a game that does what it does well enough and leaves it at that.

You'll not find yourself astounded by the gameplay nor too taxed with the puzzles and I doubt if it'll take you too long to finish it. If you do buy this game then you'll definitely not be disappointed but neither will it become one of your all-time favourite games - you'll just think "Hmmm... this is fairly nice." Which, funnily enough, is what I did.