Toobin' was never one of the best coin-op conversions to appear, but at least it had a bit of speed and a reasonable number of foes in it. Dizzy Down The Rapids is Toobin' without either of the latter. You're in a barrel, you're Dizzy (You could just as well be Fred Smith the postman, though, for what it has to do with the game!), and you're hurtling (crawling) down some rapids, trying to avoid things like crocodiles, whilst collecting apples to bung at the enemy. As opposed to the game Toobin' where you travel down some rapids, trying to avoid crocodiles and collecting tin cans to bung at the enemy.

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Ho hum. You get enemies bunging things at you from the river bank (Toobin' style), rocks you have to steer round (ditto), and all that sort of stuff. Dizzy Down The Rapids isn't an out-and-out Spectrum port like Toobin' was. Even so, the Codies might as well have just used the Toobin' code (adding a few pauses to slow it down). Don't bother with the word "derivative", you'll find some much better ones in the thesaurus.

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Standing only 30 screens tall, Prince is a bit titchy compared to Spellbound Dizzy, but it's also a lot less convoluted. And you won't have to wait till the after-life (provided there is one) to finish it.

Prince has got a really hippy trippy plot. Just imagine all the weirdest bits out of The Magic Roundabout all happening at once and Dizzy having to sort everything out.

The encouragingly simple lateral thinking puzzle you solve to get out of the first room sets the scene for the rest of the game. A little bit of thought and a little bit of exploration and you should be able to work out what the pick-up objects you encounter are for.

This is a Dizzy game as it should be. Complex enough to present a long-term challenge, but not so contrived in puzzle solutions as to propel you towards a padded cell. Smart.

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Is there a toddler in your household? If so, don't bother loading Panic Dizzy, just watch them playing with their toy postbox instead. Another re-release, Panic Dizzy is a (sooner or later) fast-moving "Tetrisy" sort of thing, where you move the joystick from left to right so the falling shapes all through correctly-shaped holes. It's competent, but doesn't do much you couldn't do with a 20-line BASIC type-in (speed excepted).

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This is one of the pack's two re-releases, and it's a pretty good game actually, though it does become quite easy after a little practice. You've got to whizz round some mazes, collecting fruit and stuff, and avoiding the baddies. You can shunt the bricks that make up the maze around, allowing you to crush the nasties and create a safer passage to the remaining collectables.

Kwik Snax is a good game, with pretty addictive gameplay and buckets of playability, but that doesn't hide the fact that (a) Dizzy looks like he has just been thrown in at the last minute to help the game sell, and (b) it's another blatant act of gameplay larceny (a game called Pengo being the victim on this occasion).

Professional Maze Sim by another other name.

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This game is supposed to be the mainstay of the compilation. At 105 rooms it's the biggest Dizzy game ever (bigger than Magic Land and Fantasy World put together), and it's one of only two Dizzy adventures in this package (Prince Of The Yolk Folk is the other one).

It shares with Prince the distinction of being the first Dizzy adventure not to have been designed by the Oliver Twins (Codies stalwarts and original creators of the little egg chap).

It hasn't deviated much from the standard Dizzy formula, though. As usual your Yolk Folk chums (Dylan, Daisy, Grand Dizzy and the other two, or is it three?) are in hot water. Thanks to your messing about with a spell book, they've been magicked into imprisonment in a strange underworld kind of place. And you've got to solve all the puzzles in the right order to set them free. Yawn.

Graphically, Spellbound Dizzy is aeons ahead of its predecessors. The star himself looks so much more stylish and detailed, as does the land he explores. But is it too difficult? The Codies reckon this one will take about four months to solve. How many but the most committed of Dizzy/Balrog fans could plug away for that long at a single game? Without either tearing their hair out in frustration or running up a parents' nightmare of a phone bill calling 0898. Hmm...

There are a lot of interesting new ideas chucked in. Dizzy scuba-diving, Dizzy in an underground ride, etc. They might raise a brief smile, but you feel they were just chucked in for the sake of it, as if there was some list of things Dizzy had never done that were being crossed off one by one.

There's not a lot that can really be said about the game. It's a Dizzy adventure like any other. Just a little big bigger, less inspired and more show-offish. Not a classic by any means.

But still miles better than most full price coin-op conversions, of course.

Dizzy's our pal, but how much do we really know about him? Did you know for instance that:

1. Most people reckon that Dizzy is an ordinary household egg, but if he was he'd break a few seconds into every adventure.
2. 'Cos eggs break really easily.
3. Your Sinclair recently announced to the world that Dizzy was actually an egg-shaped piece of mutton fat jade (a sort of stone).
4. But they just made that up.
5. So-called 'comedian' Vic Reeves has claimed for several years that the character was actually based on him (he used to be quite fat and had lots of friends whose names began with 'd').
6. He even went so far as to record a hit single with top pop combo The Wonderstuff affirming his belief as to the egg character's true origins.
7. Codemasters responded by issuing a press release stating that Dizzy was bigger than Bryan Adams.
8. Which was a complete lie.
9. Because Dizzy is only about three quarters of an inch, whereas Bryan Adams is a good six foot.
10. And Canadian.

There are both good and indifferent games in this compilation. Nevertheless, at a tad under a tenner it's great value.

Two reasonably good Dizzy games and three Dizzified arcade games (two of them a load of tosh!). It'll sell, but is it art?