Previous Next

Spindizzy is a Marble Madness clone which involves guiding an inverted pyramid around the different screens, mapping them out and collecting any jewels along the way.

You play against a clock, which doesn't even pause when your plummet to your death - you lose a precious five seconds as well as a life.

If you collect one of the many jewels strewn about the screens, you gain ten seconds, and you also get a bonus of seven seconds each time you enter a new screen.

Occasionally, you may encounter a couple of nasty creatures who push you out of the room and zap your time; avoid these at all costs.

You can call up a map at any time to show you your relative position in the game, any unmapped rooms, mapped rooms with a jewel in, and completed rooms. There are more than 350 to visit.

A nice feature is that, if you lose sight of yourself on the screen, you can turn your viewpoint round so that you can see all angels of the room, or you can point yourself north.

To make life on some screens a whole lot easier, there are lifts which can take you up to a higher ledge, which would be otherwise inaccessible without searching many other screens for a ramp.

A word of warning about the lifts: To get some of them to work you have to find and collect the object which is depicted on the lift's surface.

When you need a bit more speed to jump over a gap in the pathway or climb a big hill, there is always the speed boost, which is activated by holding down the fire button. This sends the pyramid flying along, but it's easy to overdo it and overshoot your target or crash.

Thankfully you can press the emergency stop key (the spacebar) to stop you dead on any surface with grip, which excludes ice, water and trampolines.

Talking of trampolines, you can use these to bounce over to an area impossible to reach by any other means.

The 3D graphics are probably the best I've ever seen and the sound effects quite realistic, but you don't hear them very often. This is a shame as they enhance the game greatly. Another minor grumble is that there is no music whatsoever.

Despite these minor niggles, this is an excellent game which will keep you coming back for more for many weeks to come.