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.
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