Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
i love this game, is anybody interested in a run?? this requires A LOT of planning though, and i still have batman to finish, so, i have time untill i start this if i ever do
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
theres a silly one on a 4 games cartridge it looks like pac man (i have the cartridge of the "quattro adventure" and the fantastic adv of dizzy hehe i rox) here is a direct scan of its front: the dizzy game is "go! dizzy go!" it has also c.j.'s elephant antics and stunt buggies and f-16 renegade. all games suck lol no exception :) Screenshot of the Quattro Arcade cartridge
funny, on my 1024x768 desktop the cartridges are 1:1 proportion, i dont know if i did that on purpose while scanning O_o
btw, the cartridge's name is "quattro arcade"
hmm... actually, cj.s elephant antics inst that bad, it's a weird plataformer and it has 2 simultaneos players, cool (but you shoot peas on puddles with ribbons thats weird what were they thinking??)
go dizzy go isnt that bad either too, its a mix of puzzle with pac man, but it gets repetitive :S
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
theres also dizzy the adventurer, which is diff from fantastic adventures of dizzy
edit: omg i had never actaully played this one, its like FoD, but the character says some things its actually silly lol "oh dizzy got too close to the fire!!" and he burns :P hehehe
I had one of those 4-in-1 quattro packs, but it was different. It had a dizzy game, I think some robin hood game, and two others. If I remember, it wasn't actually THAT bad.
Joined: 11/27/2004
Posts: 29
Location: Calgary, AB
I'd like to see a Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy run. If you do decide to do one, use the ROM of the Aladdin Deck Enhancer version. There are some in game alterations done by the programmers to make the game less cumbersome, which means it would probably save you some time (which, incidentally, is the only thing the people on this site/forum seem to care about)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
Yes. Yes. Yes. Please do this game. It's so big and complex, I was never able to get very far. Of course, the planning will be an absolute nightmare, and it might not be so entertaning to watch if you haven't played the game, but I'd like to see it anyway.
"Treasure Island Dizzy" on the 4-game cartridge (it is called Quattro Adventure) is much, MUCH easier than The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy. I was almost able to complete in on a NES way back, without any guide of any kind. And with an emulator, I recently completed it easily. It's really very short and easy.
Speaking of "Quattro Advendure". One day, I'm going to do this Robin Hood game on it. It's called "Super Robin Hood". It is allowed to do just one game on a four-game cartridge, right? Of course, it'll be a while before I do that run, and I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be. Oh well.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
omg can you believe i actually HAVE that cartridge too?? i didnt even remember lol, it is "4 quattro adventure" and it contains these games:
boomerang kid
super robin hood
treasure island dizzy
lunis spacehead
its a good cartridge hehei must have bought it after i kinda stopped playing nes
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
It's Linus Spacehead, silly. And that game is impossible to complete. My record was reaching level 3 (on a real NES). Hmm, maybe that game would also make a good timeattack? Meh, I don't know..
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
oh lol, sorry, typo :)
yea that game is cool, actually it starts on a undersea with bubbles going up and you have to go up or else the oxygen expires and the bubbples blow up if you stand on top of them too much... hmmm where did i see that before oh yea fantastic adventures of dizzy :P
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
i'm not planning to start this anytime soon, but the way i'd do it is to manually do everything, like snapshot each screen using the emulator and then pasting everything together on an image editing program (along with each items position)
Joined: 6/20/2004
Posts: 292
Location: United Kingdom
I love this game! Well, actually i have the genesis one, on cart. I also have a strategy guide for all the versions of this game (which is actually a script from a telephone company that you'd ring up if you need hints).
I remember once writing down the directions you had to press in the mine cart which got all the stars in one shot, whether it's in the NES version or not I don't know. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find this for years.
I think the most intriging thing is that you have to complete all the mini-games and stuff to make sure you have every single star to
--spoilers--
unlock the final dungeon
--end spoilers--
Thought i'd just do that just in case :P
Off Topic:
Dr. Morbis wrote:
I'd like to see a Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy run. If you do decide to do one, use the ROM of the Aladdin Deck Enhancer version. There are some in game alterations done by the programmers to make the game less cumbersome, which means it would probably save you some time (which, incidentally, is the only thing the people on this site/forum seem to care about)
I agree with you about the time. I thought this was a tool-assisted perfect movie site, not a time attack site... Anyway
>I thought this was a tool-assisted perfect movie site, not a time attack site.
The expressions are supposed to be equal. A lot of people confuse time attack with speed run though, so I prefed to say tool-assisted.
I'd like to see a Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy run. If you do decide to do one, use the ROM of the Aladdin Deck Enhancer version. There are some in game alterations done by the programmers to make the game less cumbersome, which means it would probably save you some time (which, incidentally, is the only thing the people on this site/forum seem to care about)
Oh, yes, there were VERY many alterations to the game, so much so that it's as if the first version was more like this weird beta version, and you could treat one as a "second quest" to the other. More different than Cosmic Spacehead was from Linus Spacehead's Cosmic Crusade, at any rate.
In version 2, Dizzy actually accelerates as he walks (as he does again in Dizzy the Adventurer), reaching a speed about twice as high as in version 1, where he appears stuck in the old 1 pixel/frame mode. This will probably be most people's argument for one version over another, as I think version 1 gets a little boring watching Dizzy wander the huge world at that one low speed. Version 2's speed also affects Dizzy's jump length, making some formerly impossible jumps possible. You can now reach the extra life game on the right-hand side of the treehouse complex without a rope swing, for example. A few gaps were widened to keep it so that you still can't jump across, like the spike pit on the ground floor, but sometimes it's not enough. They tried moving the logs holding up Dylan's elevator so you couldn't jump on top, but I still got over them and saw seizure-flashing from the constant screen transitions until Dizzy got far enough to the right to fall through! I also once made the jump in the graveyard you're supposed to need the bridge for in the Master System version, but I haven't tested that part on NES yet.
The higher speed can get you into trouble, though. It means you might end up rolling further after hitting uneven ground, sending you into a death trap. You also don't get as much time to react to enemies at the high speed, which is annoying on the right side of Dora's floor where the whole point is to react to the first spider and stop in time, but if you come in with too much speed it's impossible. (And I wonder if they intended this speed more for PAL systems, as releasing version 1 in PAL regions would have made the game intolerably slow.) Still, the higher speed lets you dodge and escape from enemies much more quickly, minimizing your damage, and the new layout tends to move enemies and traps further out of your way anyway. You might say this makes version 2 "the easy version", but I think viewers don't mind it being a little easier if it's a lot less boring. But version 1 has cool glitches involving backwards movement on impassible enemies! You may have already known you can get the tunnel guard's star without getting him to move first, but with the backwards butterfly, I got him to juggle Dizzy forever! Uh, yay?
The additional 150 stars in the newer versions sounds like a big thing, but it mainly means you just encounter them more frequently. Either way they serve to force you to explore every location even if you find ways to skip some of the puzzles; version 2 will generally just make you travel a little further into a room or make an extra jump somewhere. For example, I found that even in version 1 I could successfully jump past the dragon's flames, so you can skip all the items for making GrandDizzy's medicine, but you still need to unlock his house for his stars.
Collecting stars also has different effects on other sprites depending on which version you're playing. I haven't worked out all the details, but in version 1 the star display seems to make most enemies vanish entirely. You can walk through where they were without taking damage, and when they return, they return in the same spot as when they disappeared. In version 2 the new star display style must have been tweaked to tax the PPU less or something, because it makes a lot of things flicker, but they still act as normal as far as I could tell.
The new item collection system is worthy to note, too. Version 1 uses the old Treasure Island Dizzy style, where once you pick an item up, it takes an extra two presses of B to get it to the front of the line before you can set it down. Everything in the queue moves up once with one press of B, so you need to spread your inventory out on the ground if you need to change the order of your items while still hanging onto them all or to get rid of a hole between two items.
Version 2 tries to make it more convenient by sending the first item you pick up straight to the front of the queue; a second item you pick up will go into the middle without pushing out the first; and a third item will go to the back, again without disrupting the other two. Only when your inventory is full or when there's nothing to pick up does it behave like version 1 and let you drop something while advancing the whole queue. So in version 2 it's impossible to pick up an object and drop one at the same time unless you've already got three items and you're picking up a fourth. That means that if you need to use an item in the back while hanging onto your other two, you need five presses of B altogether, while version 1 would only need three to accomplish the same thing. So it's not always more convenient! (The Master System version changes it so that all item collection and use is done on the big menu screen, like in Dizzy the Adventurer and some of the older home computer Dizzy games. The Yolkfolk sprites are from Dizzy the Adventurer too!)
There are a few item tricks that can be done to differing degrees in either version. A definite trick to remember for speedruns is that Dizzy can grab items in mid-air! So don't just hit B to pick up things; hit A and B if you can. I believe even a jump in place is faster than Dizzy's turn-around animation. You can also drop items in mid-air with this if you're picking one up at the same time: Just keep dropping at a slightly higher level than before, and eventually you'll get one at the peak of Dizzy's jump. Kinda silly, but could be important... There are some inventory glitches related to grabbing an item during a jump to a higher screen so that the game didn't finish sliding everything over yet, but I haven't investigated them completely.
I also noticed that you can drop items in mid-air if you're falling straight downward rather than at an angle. Dizzy even turns around to do this, so I think there must not be a huge distinction between standing and falling straight down (or zipping up through the floor). Version 2 gives you more opportunities to do this, as you can coast to a stop just as you slip off a ledge. (That may also help you drop down floors of the treehouses one at a time so you don't get dizzy.) Version 1 doesn't have deceleration, so I don't think that's possible, but you can still achieve straight falling by such methods as swinging from the rope until it goes slack, or dying after you enter a room by falling into it so you respawn by falling down. (Again I don't know how floating objects would be useful, but...)
Oh, and we should think about death-warping as a strategy, in case there's one long horizontal area you have to cross for one item and come straight back from. I think the extra life mini-game takes much longer than any area, though, so try to limit it to two good death-warps.
There's also a version 3, but I don't think it's ever been dumped, and from what I read, all it really added was three more languages, and the graphics had to be made worse in some places to accommodate them.
Fantastic Dizzy on other systems... Yeah I dunno, the 16-bit versions leave out the river rapids game, and I think they make some things even easier. And they changed all the music! Why do they keep changing music in ports of Dizzy games?!
FODA wrote:
i couldnt find a complete map of screenshots for this game, so when i get down to this i'll make one. unless someone do the favor of making it
Ah, did you ever get started on this? I started making my own maps of both NES versions last month, since I'm sure they'll be helpful, and just so I can say for sure what all the layout differences are, especially for items that swapped locations and puzzles that were replaced completely. I've seen some Dizzy players call version 1 "the blue version" and version 2 "the red version" because of the change in color of the title, so that's how I've been labeling my maps. I now have the treehouse complex done, both inside and outside!
Blue treehouse complexRed treehouse complexBlue treehouse interiorsRed treehouse interiors
(I once tried pasting the treehouse interiors on top of their exteriors, but decided it was silly-looking and not very helpful and a bigger waste of space, so you just get a column of them instead. I did give the maps some "sprites on top" action and labeled the keys, though!)
I should note that you can't see the far left side of Dozy's floor without cheating, and you can't see the far left sides of many other floors in version 1 without cheating because you can't jump off with enough speed.
Yeah, the walkways get doubled up around vertical edge transitions. Not much I can do about it; that's how screen transitions work in Dizzy games. In this one Dizzy skips over about 24 pixels of space, so platforms that take him to the top of one screen will be more-or-less duplicated at the bottom of the next. I don't really want to move anything or cut anything off, as the treetops only look right if all rows are left in, and the changes in walkways can be important to note, so I'd be messing up the slopes that are actually there if I try to combine them. Now, in the castles, pretty much all 32 rows of pixels at the top of a lower screen are repeated at the bottom of a higher screen, so there I think it would be okay to consolidate them, although it does make it look as though Dizzy can jump a bit higher across the transition than he actually does.
Some enemies ended up in different places on each map even though they can appear in the same places in either version, because they may have variable spawn points. I tried figuring this out by watching enemy positions in the hex editor, and it turned out to be a little messy and inconsistent. Most enemies will keep their positions when you go to the next screen and come back, but some will snap back to one position every time you reload the screen, even if it's by hitting Select to check your inventory. (Remember that annoying rat on the right side of the trolls' castle that would keep ending up back in front of you after you jumped it?)
Some enemies will even share their position values with an enemy on another screen. A lot of those treehouse spiders seem to just take a value from a previous enemy as their own, whether that was a position value or a velocity value, and jump it down to their highest possible value if it was too high (low on the screen) or up to their lowest possible value if it was too low (high on the screen). So, whether that ant you last saw was moving to the left or to the right may affect whether the next spider is at the top of its thread or at the bottom. That's how crazy this game gets. I considered just mapping every spider at the bottom of its thread, to show how far they could drop, but I tend to prefer showing where the enemies should first appear. So that could lead to some variations in where they were placed in the two different versions of the map, due to the altered speed and terrain and item layouts.
Yeah, the ants and birds can start in a couple of different places too. Sometimes an ant would start out as far left as it could be, and other times it would start out on the far right of its track instead. The flying enemies' starting points can be influenced by other random stuff too, and I noticed that enemies seem to be able to move for one frame before they actually appear, so that made it confusing for me to map their starting spots. With the help of memory watching, I noticed the ants start moving when I reach their floor and stop when I'm about one screen length away. And I noticed Pogie is already on the move while I'm still trying to get out of Dizzy's house!
Mapping also helped me notice that there's a second spider sprite, one with a bigger body and six legs that appears on GrandDizzy's floor and in the graveyard. I think you could consider bird/bat and ant/mouse to be other instances of this "same enemy different look" pattern.
Maybe when I finish all the maps I'll combine all the ones connected by edge transitions to get a look at how wide the world really is, but I don't think I really want to submit a map with every single location crammed into it like the Genesis maps on vgmaps.com.
AdmiralJonB wrote:
I think the most intriging thing is that you have to complete all the mini-games and stuff to make sure you have every single star to unlock the final dungeon
That might not be quite true in the "blue version" (gold cartridge). On that version there are no stars in the mini-games; might have only occurred to the designers to put some in later, or maybe they were more focused on just getting the mini-games to work, and the old star display might have interfered with the game too much. Thus, I believe you can skip the "Bubble Trouble" part entirely: You can free Denzil much earlier for his flippers, swim to the island with the aqualung, and then you can breathe and swim underwater and explore the pirate ship without having to get kicked off. The "red version" (Aladdin/plug-thru) moves the match MUCH further away from your starting area, so this doesn't pay off as well (which was probably the purpose), and you eventually need the stars from the bubble trench, unless someone finds a way to trick the star counter or duplicate stars. Can't really have an "any% stars" run, since it'd be pretty sad to just end up standing in front of an electrified door as your ending.
The other vertical scrollers are required in the blue version simply because they drop you off at a key item. If anyone can do some kind of trick jump that will reach those items, then it won't be necessary to play those sequences in the blue version. So that's another difference that could influence which versions we want published: Blue version skips more, but red version does more, faster!
Yeah, so, in the differing versions debate I want to say do both NES version 1 and one of the Genesis or PC versions so they'll have the most differences, but if that's not popular, I'd say do just NES version 2. You'll get the nice NES music, all the mini-games, and the shortest load times, after all!
I suppose I should end by asking some questions of anyone who knows this game better than I do:
Is there any way to reach the orange on the ceiling of Dora's house or the watermelon in the upper-left corner of Zaks's castle? Seems a little silly to waste precious memory space putting in things you can't reach, but whatever.
The cow and the coin are completely redundant, right? I think either item gets you the bean from the shopkeeper, and then there's nothing you can do with the other. Maybe they threw in the coin just in case "Jack and the Beanstalk" was too obscure for some people, but that gives speedrunners a choice of whether to help Dylan or save an item underwater. Although, I read that it was recently discovered that in the Genesis version, if you pay for the bean with the coin, you can give the cow to Prince Clumsy before you save Dora to receive an easter egg about Prince. It's not known to work in any other versions so far.
(Speaking of redundancies, I should point out that there are two tunnels connecting Bridge Street and Castle Street on either side of the shopkeeper, with no barriers between them on either street. You still need to enter both, though, since they both contain stars, so I think you should only use the far one once right before/after getting the bean, and get the star to the right of it on Bridge Street just before/after using the tunnel so they're not as far out of your way.)
The medicine recipe doesn't actually "do" anything, does it? Is it the one item you're just supposed to look at in the inventory to make use of it, and then it's useless after the first time you've played that part? I guess so, just as I think the second gold dragon egg is only to hint that you're supposed to leave the other egg with it.
There isn't a fourth large rock in the blue version, is there? Looks like there's room to raise the water even more so you don't have to take harder jumps with more risk of rolling, but then the blue version is full of ludicrously precise jumps like that.
There isn't a seventh extra life puzzle, is there? I noticed there were tiles to say "9 LIVES LEFT" in the PPU Viewer, but I can only get up to 9 lives, meaning the most I can see that message say when I lose a life is 8. Maybe the programmers just weren't sure if there would be 6 or 7 extra lives in the final game. They must have been sure there weren't 8, though, because I saw no tiles for 1 or 0!
I also wonder a bit about the places the mine cart ride drops you off at. The second exit leaves you stranded if you didn't clear the path through the leprechaun or have swimming gear handy, so when you kill yourself, you end up back at the mine cart... Except what if you did explore some more, would it eventually update your respawn point? Hm, I'll check into that more sometime. On other systems they let you enter through that exit to reappear at the cart, so that's nice that they don't make you lose a life. And the third and fourth exits would leave you stranded in the town and graveyard if you weren't able to go to the left and swim back again, or if you hadn't bribed the guard, except you can still get out through the river rapids game (which has at least one side exit to the town, too). The 16-bit versions don't have the river, so that must be why they added a second bag of coins somewhere. But then you could still get stranded if you didn't bring the meat to the rhino-thing yet, so you would have to go through the pirate ship and play the bubble game to get out. The barrel of rum you can get in town in the blue version, but in the red version you would also have to play the river game to get the barrel, so that must be why they moved the bag of coins to the left of the rhino! And I bet the first mine cart exit is so useless because if it were any deeper in the mine in the blue version, you could get stuck behind an inactive elevator.
Though I don't think there's any protection against just leaving your rope in a place you can only reach with the rope, so, unwinnability, hurrah!
While I'm thinking about the mine, I should point out that the diamonds there restore Dizzy's health without making him do the munching animation, so you could try to plan most of your healing there if you can, I don't know.
One more thing: When you play this in FCEUX, use Old PPU to make the opening story scroll less glitchy, and turn off that Allow More Than 8 Sprites deal during the minecart game so Dizzy passes under the overhang post things.
Blublu wrote:
It's Linus Spacehead, silly. And that game is impossible to complete. My record was reaching level 3 (on a real NES). Hmm, maybe that game would also make a good timeattack? Meh, I don't know..
That used to be about how far I could get before I started using savestates--not just to cheat, but to practice on a single level until I had it all nailed down. Now I can beat the game without savestates at all, usually losing about four lives mainly because the last few levels are still too unpredictable for me, but I want to get a run where I collect every candy and don't die at all so I can show everyone how it's done!
A new TAS of it might be nice, too. I'd like to see what kind of result it would get in the "screenshot averaging" topic. (What little onscreen text there is would get smeared up and down from the bouncing.)
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/20/2004
Posts: 292
Location: United Kingdom
Who would have thought a 5 year old topic would bring me back to this website...
If a run were ever to be made of this, I'd definitely be one to look at it. I've considered doing a TAS over the years of this, but I just don't have the patience to do it. That, and I'd be more likely to do the Genesis Version. It's definitely a game worthy of a speed run/TAS though imo.
Oh right, you did a couple of 1-minute movies of Fantastic Dizzy, didn't you? And somebody else did a 15-minute movie, right? What happened to that one?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
So I went left and mapped the area around the waterfall! And since that place is pretty short, not having anything directly above or below it, I decided to also map that river rapids mini-game whose final destination is that waterfall. Only that ended up taking longer than anywhere else to map, because I wanted to carefully edit out the random sparkles on the water. See, I guess they thought it wasn't bad enough to put animations like the torches, waterfall, and water waves on a global timer so I have trouble figuring out what the initial state would be, and it still wasn't bad enough to load in the next frame of animation to the same tile rather than switching tiles so I can't just go by what comes first in the PPU Viewer. No, for the river water the programmers got really fancy and found a way to drop pixels onto five tiles and move them around randomly. The pixels always stay in the same rows, but at any time they can jump to another column without affecting anything else. This creates a nice "sparkling" effect of bits of light moving about the water, and by only allowing one pixel per row per tile, it makes it much more likely to see pixels lined up vertically than horizontally, giving the water a downward flowing appearance. But it means I'll never see those tiles in the same pattern twice, and choosing any pattern they're in would be very arbitrary because they're so random, so I just blanked out all the random tiles! That takes so long, for the red version map I just compared each screenshot to the blue version's map and only changed what was different aside from the random sparkles. There's a whopping 10 stars added, which makes me wonder where they were all moved to for the "16-bit" ports. The only other change was taking out a hunk of rocks near the second exit, I think because you can get stuck forever there if you approach it from the top. But then why couldn't they have fixed this other "stuck forever" spot?
Also annoying about the vertical scrollers is that the bottom-left tile of the playing area is always the same tile, no matter what it's really supposed to be, so you only see what's really there when you scroll down enough. But I don't know how to properly scroll past the end of the mini-game, so until I get better ROM peeking skills, that last corner is going to look wrong.
Some of the enemies I was unsure how to place exactly at first. The crocodiles wobble around in some weird way before they truly start their regular patrol, so I decided to map them where they first faced left. But later I realized they sank down a pixel by the time they were fully onscreen. I only mapped two barrel troll spots. There's a point where each troll will be stopped from following you by an invisible barrier of some sort; I couldn't really show that, but that was my basis for having a second troll in the water, that you're forced to go water-troll-free for a while. Barrel trolls only appear when you're as far down on the screen as you can be, I've found. The second troll will only appear in pretty much that one area I mapped him at, but the first troll can keep coming back at any point before the invisible wall, so I had to take that part slowly, as having a troll on-screen will prevent other trolls (and I think one crocodile) from appearing. The land trolls that throw rocks also prevent other trolls from appearing, which makes it a little hard to find the middle of the "3-in-a-row" land trolls. One way to confirm them all is to go upward, and the land trolls will appear at their spots at the bottom of the screen, except when you scroll upward they appear 7 pixels too low. See how confusing this game gets? I hope that helps for speedrunning it...
I guess I don't want to go into too much more depth on the adventure areas yet, because I want to do one big "version differences analysis" when all the maps are done so I can say what items moved where. But feel free to see for yourself!
Blue Crystal FallsRed Crystal FallsBlue Crystal/Swift RiverRed Crystal/Swift River
Oh and one more version difference is that red version has a credits page after the characters list.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/20/2004
Posts: 292
Location: United Kingdom
These are really coming along. I've been watching a few things about fantastic dizzy since you mentioned did a few days ago, there are certainly a lot of things to consider for a speed run/TAS. I watched the speed run from your link, and I'm not too certain about some of the things they did, but I think I shall have another look. Is it really faster to go through the mine cart sequence twice is one example. No promises to anything yet.
I'm sure your maps would be very useful to whoever does a TAS.
I know it's different in the NES version, but in the Mega Drive/Genesis version you've got the annoying butterflies that are sometimes placed exactly the wrong position and knock you backwards. I watched some NES videos, and if I recall they reverse your controls?
There's also the huge portion of where to put items, but I shall start thinking that through at another point.
Yeah, the butterflies reverse your left and right controls for a while in the 8-bit versions, just like the red bee from Treasure Island Dizzy. (I'm told this game is mostly a mash-up of puzzles from previous Dizzy games, but at this point I'm only familiar with the NES releases, so I just recognize a lot of Treasure Island Dizzy puzzles and a couple of Dizzy the Adventurer puzzles.) But the butterflies were a bigger nuisance in the clouds of the 16-bit versions. I wonder if the knock-back from the butterflies could be a useful boost in any of them.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/20/2004
Posts: 292
Location: United Kingdom
Yeah, I've been watching some LPs of other Dizzy games, And you can see that they have taken a lot of the puzzles from the previous games. CPCGamer on YouTube as the fantasy world dizzy and magic island dizzy (I think that's what it's called). I'd say fantastic dizzy could be classed as a compilation of all the other games maybe… Including all the mini game ones. Especially considering you defeat Zaks in the same way as Sauron in magic island dizzy (while making a pact with the devil at the same time…).
I read that the bubble-jumping mini-game was designed as part of The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy from the beginning, and then they decided it was fun enough to sell as its own game, just like Dizzy Down the Rapids. Only, productions delays caused Bubble Dizzy to come out before The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, so players of the old computer games tend to think that Fantastic Dizzy was just incorporating Bubble Dizzy into itself to make it longer.
I was thinking earlier, if someone does finish a TAS of this game, there should be a note to the encoders that it's not an A/V desync that makes the music start so late, but rather it's delayed on purpose in case you end up moving back and forth through a screen transition rapidly so you don't hear each song starting over so many times.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 6/20/2004
Posts: 292
Location: United Kingdom
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
I was thinking earlier, if someone does finish a TAS of this game, there should be a note to the encoders that it's not an A/V desync that makes the music start so late, but rather it's delayed on purpose in case you end up moving back and forth through a screen transition rapidly so you don't hear each song starting over so many times.
Is that the reason for it? I always found it extremely annoying as a kid, as I wanted some of my favourite music to play when I was exploring certain areas and must have been a little impatient :P. But I do agree with that viewpoint nowadays a bit more.
Also annoying about the vertical scrollers is that the bottom-left tile of the playing area is always the same tile, no matter what it's really supposed to be, so you only see what's really there when you scroll down enough. But I don't know how to properly scroll past the end of the mini-game, so until I get better ROM peeking skills, that last corner is going to look wrong.
Some of the enemies I was unsure how to place exactly at first. The crocodiles wobble around in some weird way before they truly start their regular patrol, so I decided to map them where they first faced left. But later I realized they sank down a pixel by the time they were fully onscreen. I only mapped two barrel troll spots. There's a point where each troll will be stopped from following you by an invisible barrier of some sort; I couldn't really show that, but that was my basis for having a second troll in the water, that you're forced to go water-troll-free for a while. Barrel trolls only appear when you're as far down on the screen as you can be, I've found. The second troll will only appear in pretty much that one area I mapped him at, but the first troll can keep coming back at any point before the invisible wall, so I had to take that part slowly, as having a troll on-screen will prevent other trolls (and I think one crocodile) from appearing. The land trolls that throw rocks also prevent other trolls from appearing, which makes it a little hard to find the middle of the "3-in-a-row" land trolls. One way to confirm them all is to go upward, and the land trolls will appear at their spots at the bottom of the screen, except when you scroll upward they appear 7 pixels too low. See how confusing this game gets? I hope that helps for speedrunning it...
I guess I don't want to go into too much more depth on the adventure areas yet, because I want to do one big "version differences analysis" when all the maps are done so I can say what items moved where. But feel free to see for yourself!
Blue Crystal Falls
Red Crystal Falls
Blue Crystal/Swift River
Red Crystal/Swift River
Oh and one more version difference is that red version has a credits page after the characters list.
