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Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk

Started by Jerzy Bondov, December 09, 2011, 05:52:36 PM

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Jerzy Bondov

Fucking Dizzy is fucking back!
A video of Dizzy!

It's one of those HD remakes, for phones, which is slightly disappointing. However, isn't it great to know that somebody working at a company thinks that people are still going to be interested in a game about a grinning egg?

I have very fond memories of playing through most of the original games on the Atari ST with my dad. We even called an extortionate tip-line to find out where the last gold coin was on Fantasy World Dizzy. It was behind a window in a treehouse. Fantastic!

Magicland Dizzy was my favourite, because you could go down into Hell and Satan would give you a trident which you could use to stab an evil wizard. I never actually played Prince of the Yolkfolk - we bought it but it wouldn't work for some reason (the ST displayed the dreaded system error bombs). I'm looking forward to wrestling my way through it for the first time using some probably appalling touch-screen controls.

Share Dizzy memories in this thread!

I accept the terms of the

It looks utterly shit. How have they managed to make Dizzy look so shit? Some of the surroundings and other characters look okay, so why does the main part of the game look worse than the ZX Spectrum original?

Also, who the fuck thought that scrolling was necessary?

Jemble Fred

Just downloaded it, but it'll be a while before I have time to stop everything and enjoy the experience. Yes it is disappointing that it's a remake of a game I could recite the entire guide to in my sleep, and it'll take all of 30 minutes to complete – but the dear hope is that enough downloads will lead to new official Dizzy games, maybe even – though this is pushing it – a re-entry into console gaming. So I'll support Codies' change of heart every way I can – just when I'd totally written them off as makers of only petrolhead fodder.

Jerzy Bondov

Well I can't even get it to download. Whether it's on an Atari ST or an HTC phone, I am doomed to look at error messages every time I try to play Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk.

The Amiga/ST graphics were the best ones, so charming and detailed, and would have looked great on a little phone screen. But sorry mate they're not FULL HD so in the bin they go.

You're right Jemble, I'm going to try again in the hope that my purchase leads directly to a huge new adventure on XBLA and Steam and all that shit.

Phil_A

#4
I'd like it if they made a new Dizzy game which actually took into account the improvements in gameplay design that have taken place over the last twenty years.  When I replay the old ones these days, I end up getting frustrated by all the needlessly unfair bullshit they put in to try and balance out the simplicity of the puzzles, like that one jump over water in Magicland Dizzy that is just a couple of pixels too far, so about 70% of the time you slip and die. Mind you, at least in that one you had multiple lives and an energy bar, not like in Treasure Island where one touch of an enemy/spike/torch = instant game over. Who thought that was a good idea?

I agree that graphically, the 16 bit ones do hold up very well, especially when played via emulation on a PSP.

Jemble Fred

I agree that some of the pixel-perfect puzzling in the original games now belongs to a lost era, but at the same time I can't think of any game I've played this gaming generation which wasn't chockablock with many new kinds of 'needlessly unfair bullshit'.

For all the 'improvements in game design' since the early 90s, for me no game since released can compete with the likes of Fantasy World Dizzy. 8-bit luddite though I may be labelled.

I accept the terms of the

The scale of the Dizzy games meant that stuff was okay, really. It wasn't hard to master those bits. I don't think it's worth doing a modern Dizzy game. The character doesn't work well when you can make it look however you want it to look (the "gaps" are filled in - it only worked when you had few pixels and colours) and the games would have to be too large. Even the last couple of Dizzies on the Spectrum were too large for their own good.

Jemble Fred

Yes but in those days you had to have a Game Genie or something to save progress – I'd be happy to play Dizzy for as long as some folk play Skyrim, if I could just save on the fly.

But fuck the platform elements anyway, it's all about the puzzling, the inventive item usage, that's what I've missed in gaming since Dizzy cracked, plus the charm of the world itself.

I accept the terms of the

Yeah, I think you're essentially right about the action parts. I'd just say that they don't need to be there at all. Not dying because you jumped into a torch in an adventure game is a game design lesson we hadn't quite learned by that point.

Dark Sky

I was watching that video thinking, "hurray, I used to love Dizzy, but god, didn't it look shit, can't wait for this new game!"

Ho hum.

madhair60

Anyone else play Mad Professor Mariarti on the Archimedes?

Jerzy Bondov

The bit in Magicland where you ride on the shark fin is something that I started out finding next to impossible, and eventually could do without even thinking about it. That's a good memory that comes out of the cruel platforming, but then I also remember cocking up and getting crushed by a set wooden stakes in Treasure Island Dizzy while looking for the gold coins, which was infuriating.

Fantastic Dizzy has some evil dickhead spider or something on every screen. That world is so much hassle to get around, especially with the mine cart game and stuff like that. A decent modern Dizzy would let you carry as many things as you wanted and plop you back at a checkpoint if you missed a lily-pad and plunged into a haunted lake. It would also have a beautiful cartoony world where you're always itching to find out what's on the next screen - that's the core of Dizzy for me. And it would have treehouses.

madhair60

I don't want to be able to carry infinite things, but maybe have sporadic "item boxes" like in the old Resident Evils, that you could store things in and pick them up elsewhere?

Waking Life

You could drop the items anywhere though and pick them up later IIRC, it didn't need item boxes.

I was always a big fan of the first 3, it'd be good to see Treasure Island remade with a save facility.  Although I suppose I could just get an emulator on the laptop.

Jerzy Bondov

You could drop the items anywhere, but the bigger the games got, the more likely you were to say 'fuck it' when you realised that you'd left the key you needed on the other side of a mean scary dragon forty screens away.

Looking forward to an HD remake of Fast Food Dizzy next.

Jemble Fred

Yes, so I was just on my way back to wake up Daisy, having been made a Prince and with every cherry collected... Got snagged on the scenery and irretrievably stuck in it.

Besides the numerous shameful alterations they've made, both to the gameplay and to Dizzy himself (which I was going to mention, but in the light of this, fuck them), I'm in a pretty damn good mind to send Codemasters a rather fucking angry complaint for putting out unfinished buggy games like this. The sound doesn't even work. A poor, poor start to any campaign to bring the greatest game character in history back.[nb]No, not Rick Dangerous, fuck off, fuck you, fuck everything.[/nb]

The Plunger

Quote from: Jemble Fred on December 10, 2011, 12:45:48 AM
A poor, poor start to any campaign to bring the greatest game character in history back.[nb]No, not Rick Dangerous, fuck off, fuck you, fuck everything.[/nb]

That would surely be the wee yellow guy in New Zealand Story ? Whatever he was.

Sexton Brackets Drugbust

As the greatest game character ever, what is Dizzy's main character trait?

Is it that he is an egg?

madhair60


madhair60

Quote from: The Plunger on December 10, 2011, 12:53:54 AM
That would surely be the wee yellow guy in New Zealand Story ? Whatever he was.

TIKI THE KIWI

I accept the terms of the

People might be interested in this anecdote from The Oliver Twins about how they developed the character:

"Our graphics package Panda Sprites had the ability to rotate an image through any number of degrees and save it out. In those days that was a cool feature so we thought we'd include a cart-wheeling character in our new game. The only problem was that a character of any detail broke up too much during this process so we decided to keep it simple, and maybe that's part of its charm."

http://web.archive.org/web/20090603185404/http://www.olivertwins.com/earlyyears.htm

Funny really, because they could easily have just drawn those two frames of rotation.

Zero Gravitas

That is the worst 2D collision detection I have ever seen.

I thought everyone was always on about how cool this egg was!?

Jemble Fred

In the iPhone version, Dizzy has a really dodgy gripping animation for when you bash awkwardly into every platform, then he often judders in that position for a few second before pinging into place. He can also switch direction jumping in mid-air, which fucks up hundreds of familiar jumping sections – especially going through clouds, which you still sink through. Add to this the controls, which are littered around the screen left and right – but with up in the bottom right-hand corner, and you have a real pig of a game to control.

Also, the new version doesn't have lives – the game is timed for leaderboards, and you collect stars to build up your time before you get hints or somesuch shite. So when you die you lose a bit of time.

When I got trapped in the scenery, literally two minutes from completing the game, I had a score of about 2,500 but all I can do now is watch it tick down as Dizzy slides into the earth in a never-ending fit.

I accept the terms of the

Hah. And yet 20 years ago they had the collision detection pixel-perfect.

A lot of iPhone developers are chancers who have learned from shit tutorials on the 'net written by people who shouldn't be teaching in the first place (but AdSense pennies are so important!). Looks like some of them scored jobs/contracts with The Oliver Twins.

Also, the modern version hasn't also missed a fucking fundamental game design lesson: The levels in Dizzy were designed around the mechanics of the character on that platform. If you're going to fuck with them you're going to end up with levels that either look or feel wrong unless you redesign them. Twats.

Jemble Fred

You'd think they'd at least bung up all the original games, the Spectrum versions or something, all at once for a reduced price. They'd surely get more money that way rather than spending lots of money on developing an inferior remake.

Oh, we're back onto inferior remakes...

madhair60

I have put all the old Spectrum Dizzy games on my DS.  Much better.

MojoJojo

Quote from: I accept the terms of the on December 10, 2011, 04:16:27 PM
Hah. And yet 20 years ago they had the collision detection pixel-perfect.

A lot of iPhone developers are chancers who have learned from shit tutorials on the 'net written by people who shouldn't be teaching in the first place (but AdSense pennies are so important!). Looks like some of them scored jobs/contracts with The Oliver Twins.

If it's anything like the programming for an xbox with xna, there are simple reasons why doing pixel perfect detection is actually harder on modern platforms. Pixels are at the end of a "pipeline", and pulling the data back the other way is slow.

Although I still managed to do pixel perfect in my shitty little unreleased evening project.

I'd also point out that the price being asked for Dizzy Prince Of The Yolkfolk is at least half, probably a 5th of it's original price. Not sure of the exact detail.

Not sure why I'm defending them, shitty collision detection isn't really acceptable regardless.

QuoteAlso, the modern version hasn't also missed a fucking fundamental game design lesson: The levels in Dizzy were designed around the mechanics of the character on that platform. If you're going to fuck with them you're going to end up with levels that either look or feel wrong unless you redesign them. Twats.

Yeah, that sounds fucked up... half arsed programmer and a dogsbody porting the "content" to a generic platform game engine.

I accept the terms of the

Oops, meant to say "has" missed a fundamental game design lesson.

Regarding collision detection, it shouldn't be hard to transform an oval to match the current position and rotation of Dizzy. And I'll be damned if you can't use masking in some buffer in OpenGL to do the collision detection according to the drawn image.

biggytitbo

I was about to say that.


An ipad remake of the best game ever Head over Heels could be awesome, if they can get the controls right.

madhair60

Got to the end of Fantasy World Dizzy for the first time only to be told to go and get all the coins.  Fuck that.

Back to Treasure Island Dizzy.  I'm gonna do all of them.