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Chuckie Egg is something of a poor man's cross between Program Power's Killer Gorilla and Acornsoft's Monsters.

The object of the game is to climb ladders and clamber across brick walls in the attempt to collect a dozen eggs which are individually spaced around the screen. On your trail are some hostile ostriches, out to peck you into submission. These look quite impressive as they strut loftily about the place searching for food, piles of which are to be found near to the eggs. If they find these comestibles, they bend their heads and swallow it down; all very neatly depicted.

Meanwhile, as your rotund figure works his way through the task at hand, he discovers various features, some of which are borrowed from Chuckie Egg's aforementioned ancestors. Gaps in the walls are not too much of a surprise but one cannot help chuckling when the elevators appear third time through, (the procedure and the screen appearance are unchanged from one screen to the next.) These, unfortunately, resemble yellow bats (animals, not cricketing apparatus) rather than the intended object.

Despite their optical peculiarities, it is the elevators that provide most of the problems - and this is as far as I got.

So that I do not convey a totally bleak picture of this game, I ought to highlight a few of its good features.

Firstly, there is the facility to define your own movement keys - this really should be part of any game, for it takes so little trouble to implement it. Particularly impressive is what occurs when you jump off a wall. Instead of falling dead immediately, you may move down to a lower level and continue. As well as this, it is possible to rebound yourself off the side of walls and even to bounce off the edge of elevators in order to attain your desired position. This, complete with no less than a four player option, completes a trio of novel features that greatly improve the playability of the game.

In concluding, I feel that the course taken by this review is quite a typical sequence of reactions to this game. At first it appears to be old territory re-visited but as proceedings get more familiar, it grows on you and establishes itself as quite a good program in its own right.

Dave Reeder