Producer: A&F Software
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £6.90
Language: Machine code
Our hero, Hen House Harry, has had a hail for help from the owner of the local chocolate egg factory, the automated production line has ground to a halt. The special consignment has to be completed and Harry, the fool, has volunteered to complete the final batch of eggs.
All Harry has to do is put together a few eggs. Each egg has three ingredients, cocoa milk and sugar but due to rather sloppy stock-keeping the ingredients are scattered around the factory, this is particularly annoying when you realise that each egg needs eight amounts of each ingredient, did the storekeeper put them all in the same place? Of course not. As you locate all of the ingredients you will have to take care that each ingredient goes into the correct vat, otherwise the end product may may emerge less than gracefully. Harry's life is made even more hectic by the company's policy of putting toy kits inside each egg because each toy has eight pieces which must be found and placed into the toy maker.
None of this exactly easy, and there are the inevitable monsters hanging around that make life tougher still. Once an egg is completed Harry must take it to the despatch department and start on the next, but each egg becomes harder to finish because while Harry has been so busy all the little monsters have been breeding.
Chuckie Egg is an arcade/adventure in the sense that various obstacles and problems bar the way, and the solutions are to be found within the game. This may involve collecting an object and taking it elsewhere or simply finding and operating a switch. Objects carried are indicated at the top of the screen, just to jog your memory.
The game differs quite a lot from Chuckie Egg - although the action still takes place on platforms, there are 120 interlinked screens, each with their own character and monsters. A hi-score facility is provided along with a game load and save. As well as being able to save a partially completed game the player can also save the scoreboard, this feature has been included so that the Chuckie Egg 2 competition entrants can send in their scores, and be believed!
COMMENTS
Control keys: definable
Joystick: almost any via UDK
Keyboard play: very responsive indeed
Use of colour: fairly basic but attractive
Graphics: nice but a few attribute problems
Sound: strange
Skill levels: one
Lives: five
Screens: 120
Special features: SAVE facility allows you to get around the 'back to the start' problem
As a follow on from the mega-popular Chuckie Egg 1, which has consistently ridden high in the CRASH hotline charts Chuckie Egg 2 promises hours of fun and is a worthy successor. A & F have come up with a very jolly arcade action adventurette with cheerful graphics and an amusing theme. While I haven't yet managed to master the game and penetrate deep into the factory complex, I have been assisted in my attempts by the save screen option. Canny players entering a new screen with a handful of lives in reserve can save their position to tape and explore the perils that lie before them safe in the knowledge that snuffing it needn't mean slogging their way back up from the start screen.
The original Chuckie Egg a game still popular with many, is now rather old. Its successor, Chuckie Egg 2, is more of an arcade adventure than the original and boasts 120 different screens, I only managed to see a handful of them. Those screens that I did see impressed me, some were compressed into passages while others contained ropes or ramps, these variations gave the game that 'I wonder what's next' appeal. I would have found the game very tedious had it not been for the game save facility, the idea of having to face those moles again! A worthy successor indeed.
Chuckie Egg 2 is quite a departure from Chuckie Egg (the first). The graphics are still essentially the same but with a few additions and many Jet Set Willy style features. All are very nicely animated, some being small, others being quite large. I must say that I love the way the hand crawls about - a very realistic hand it is. The game itself is playable although the main niggle is that you are forced to repeat the two start screens on each new game which are not part of the main game, and this becomes boringly repetitive. One the other hand, the SAVE facility helps overcome this problem. But in the main game everything is playable and interesting and when you go into the next screen you never quite know what to expect. The game will become addictive to the Jet Set brigade who will want to know their way round the chocolate factory, but overall I didn't find it very addictive, but not bad either. A nice progression.
Ross: Hen House Harry's back but he's no longer running round collecting seed while avoiding maniac hens. Harry's chucked up his rural roots to help out in a chocolate egg factory. The ladders and platforms have partly been replaced by ropes and travelators and there's not a caged bird in sight. Harry's task now is to collect all the goodies that go into making a choccy egg as well as the pieces of the toy to go inside it
Harry can also pick up and drop many items that may help him on his way. For example, the first problem you come up against is an outsized pooch that's far from friendly. To get past him you have to collect a bone and then drop it at his feet. The dog then turns away, his tail wagging with pleasure and lets you pass. In the next 117 screens be prepared to meet all sorts of nasties and to face many more problems.
Harry runs around and bounces off walls in the same hectic way as he did in the original Chuckie Egg, but somehow the game lacks a certain appeal. To be fair to A'n'F they haven't tried to produce a clone of CE 1. But by going for a game with 120 screens, each screen lacks a lot in the way of content.
You'll find your path is generally easy and very often there are no nasties to stand in your way. Still, it's enjoyable enough, though it may not appeal to the more sophisticated games player. 3/5 HIT
Dave: Reasonable graphics, smooth movement, more platforms than Waterloo Station and about as addictive as British Rail coffee! 2/5 HIT
Roger: As platform stuff goes, this is bad enough to make a chap chuckie up. Never mind the 'henhouse', I'd put Harry in the doghouse... 1/5 MISS
Publisher: A & F
Price: £6.90
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair
So you thought you had seen the last of it. No more Chuckie Egg, no more little yellow Harry to run up ladders and jump off platforms. You were wrong. Chuckie Egg II has arrived, and it's every bit as nauseating as the original.
Chuckie Egg was one of the earliest levels and ladders programs, a game which everybody loathed and nobody could stop playing. The sequel has Harry attempting to get a chocolate egg factory working again, and has a definite arcade-adventure feel to it.
Played across 200 odd screens of basic girder-plus-peculiar-monsters graphics, Chuckie Egg II requires much shinning up of ropes and jumping over rats and lizards to complete. Objects which must be picked up along the way are used in other screens to delay monsters or achieve a particular exit.
There is little or nothing original about the program, which relies heavily on all the old conventions of the genre, although to be fair A&F can lay some claim to having established a few of those conventions themselves. The graphics are lurid and not of the best detail, but have that special Chuckie Egg quality all the same. An improvement is the abolition of the requirement to complete each screen before proceeding further. That is no longer necessary, and the resulting maze of exits and entrances to different screens is one of the more complex we have seen.
A competition with cash prizes for the highest scores adds a little zest to the proceedings, and certainly A&F groupies will find Chuckie Egg II just as frustratingly addictive as their first encounter with the henhouse, those many moons ago.
Spectrum
A & F
Arcade Adventure
£6.90
It was too much to expect really. How could anyone come with an idea as simple, as funny, as infuriatingly addictive as Chucky Egg? A&F have wisely chosen to depart from the formula of their classic game in its successor.
Chucky Egg 2 is more in the mould of the arcade adventure, even though it features the same hero - Hen House Harry - and another eggy plot. This time Harry's job is to help get chocolate eggs made.
He must collect the ingredients, put them in the vat and then find the components of the toys that go inside the eggs. Once an egg's finished he has to send it on to despatch.
Before he can enter the factory he has to get past a huge and slavering red dog. A bone comes in useful. Once inside, the first screen - of 120 - presents the problem of getting through a room in which deadly spiders are bouncing up and down on their heads.
Then it's on to a maze full of birdies, a stomping boot that seems just a little too familiar from other games of this ilk, mixtures of ladders and platforms, and so on.
There isn't too much to surprise you in the way of gameplay, but it's all very well designed and it's certainly not an easy game to crack.
I don't think anybody's going to play this game for three weeks non-stop in order to get a high-score of 10 billion, but it's good fun and has lots of tricky puzzles to crack.
A & F Software
£6.90
At long last the sequel to one of my all time favourite games has arrived. At first I was a bit disappointed to see that all the cute ducks and hens of the original game had been abandoned in favour of a more conventional platform game arrangement. But, Chuckie Egg 2 (or Choccie Egg as it is cutely subtitled due to its Easter release date) is still very enjoyable.
You must move Henhouse Harry around a large factory (120 rooms) and collect the ingredients to make Easter Eggs. Along the way you will meet manic hoovers, shaggy dogs, moles and other assorted deadly sprites. In addition, Chuckie Egg 2 has an arcade/adventure element that allows you to carry various objects (normally only two at a time) that you will need to solve some puzzles (for instance, in order to get past the shaggy dog, you must first collect a bone to distract him with).
Another adventure-type element is the inclusion of a SAVE game facility that comes in very handy. If you come across any screens that look too tricky, you can just SAVE the game position, try to navigate the new screen, and, if you lose all your lives, you can just reload the SAVEd game and try again.
The graphics are quite good, some of the sprites are very good, but the attribute problems of the original are still present and Harry himself seems to move rather more slowly than he used to (getting old perhaps?). But all things considered, if you're in the market for yet another platform game you could do worse than taking a bite out of Choccie Egg.
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