An improved version of the first part of Dizzy is in development

February 17, 2021, 13:57 Mikhail Sudakov ред.

The first part of Dizzy's adventures has always stood a bit apart from its followers. At the time, the Oliver twins hadn't yet found the recipe for the perfect arcade quest (on which several official games and hundreds of fan games would later be made) and weren't very savvy at developing games for the ZX Spectrum. So Ultimate Cartoon Adventure lags noticeably in some places (even compared to Treasure Island Dizzy), the main character is not "masked" - and so on and so forth. No, it's a great game anyway, but it could really use a bit of tweaking.

Well, that's exactly what Andrei Titov (Titus) is doing right now - he is known for numerous DizzyAGE engine improvements (like smooth scrolling), participation in creation of great Dizzy and The Ring of Zaks and in many other games localizations. Yes, for once he turned his attention specifically to the first part Dizzy and is already finishing work on a remix of sorts that will boast the following improvements:

• 16 new screens;
• 11 new items;
• optimized code and 2-3 times faster graphics, making the game faster and smoother (now it is in sync with the framerate);
• many items were redrawn;
• a lot of bugs fixed;
• new sounds were added;
• a bit of plot has been added;
• Dizzy is now rendered "by mask".

At the same time, the engine algorithm, controls and gameplay are left intact (at least in the first half of the game) - it's still the same good old first "Dizzy", which is a little "fatter", became nicer and smoother. For example, here's what the log room looked like in the original game (left) and what it looks like now (right):

Valery Surzhenko, the author of the Dizzy SE engine, who is involved in testing the game, also shared with us screenshots of a couple of brand new screens:

The exact release date is still unknown, but the developers claim it will happen very soon. We'd like to rejoice that Dizzy is the most alive person on Spectrum, and we hope, that somebody will fix the biggest Treasure Island Dizzy's glitch, that we're still ashamed of - only one life.