Yep, I guess they thought too many players hated it. That's one reason why I think of Spellbound Dizzy as the Dizzy game for hardcore fans and Crystal Kingdom Dizzy as the Dizzy game for casual fans. (With Fantastic Dizzy I think they figured out how to please both again.)Originally Posted by Joe
I imagine the designers wanted to punish the player a little for jumping too recklessly, but notice that only the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64 "Lite" versions of Spellbound Dizzy made Dizzy also take damage for falling too hard. That served to add Fake Difficulty to a game that really didn't need it, as having to climb back up after missing a jump should be punishment enough. In The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy they were punishing you more with the time Dizzy spent motionless, as it was proportional to the time he spent falling and left him open to being killed by nearby enemies. In Dizzy the Adventurer I think they just threw in the dizzy animation because it was cute and made the game more like The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy.
Yeah, that's why I don't get why Mataeus defends the Commodore 64 versions so much. The physics were copied so sloppily, especially in Spellbound Dizzy, where it felt as if the lack of dizziness from falling and the slowdown for certain directions were due to some clumsy "bug fixes" made after the Lite edition turned out so messy.
It's kinda funny how Crystal Kingdom Dizzy was easily the best of the Commodore 64 ports, but then it wouldn't have been as difficult to get the physics right when there's no need to worry about rolling or stiff exacting jumps. I only wonder why the Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 versions couldn't have added forward-facing jump sprites since they changed all the graphics anyway, and why they couldn't have added the ability to jump continuously by holding the button down. You see, in all other Dizzy games, Dizzy will always jump again when you are holding the button, even if you've been holding it since before he started his previous jump. This is a helpful feature, because it means you don't have to press the jump button and the direction you want to move next at the exact same time to perform your intended jump correctly; you can jump in place and start holding the direction you want, but Dizzy won't actually start to move forward until he lands, and then he will accept the jump command and the directional command at the same time and make the appropriate jump from the original spot.
(The manual for Linus Spacehead actually encouraged players to do this, but in that game I feel it doesn't work as well because the acceleration physics make it too difficult to tiptoe up to an edge safely, and the continuous jump button detection mainly just causes players to complain about "bouncing". The fact that Dizzy could only move in 4-pixel increments was another feature that helped keep you from overshooting the point you wanted to jump from, so it's unfortunate that it was jettisoned in Crystal Kingdom Dizzy and all the upgraded Dizzy games except Treasure Island in the interests of making the gameplay "smoother". But this is all a big digression, hence the parentheses!)
But in Crystal Kingdom Dizzy on 8-bit computers, Dizzy won't jump unless you press the jump key after he's already landed. It won't even count if you let go of the button and press it again in the middle of the jump; you have to have let go once Dizzy's on the ground to be able to make Dizzy jump again, so you can no longer jump from an exact spot that way. You just have to time hitting the buttons together right.
The 16-bit versions of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy brought back the continuous jumping with holding the button, but they also made it so Dizzy could change direction during a jump, so it still wasn't possible to use that method to fix your jump to the maximum length from the last point. They had to make it into a casual platformer jump style!
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