Amstrad Computer User


Chuckie Egg
By A 'n F
Amstrad CPC464

 
Published in Amstrad Computer User #10

Chuckie Egg

Chuckie Egg is quite a well known game and has been available on several other machines. It consists of that well tried game format: platforms and ladders. You play the part of a farmer who must get round and pick up all the eggs on a screen, before the ostrichesque birds can eat all the red piles of grain.

Travel between levels is accomplished by use of the ladders that connect each level, or, on higher level screens, the lifts that circulate. The eggs are automatically picked up when you bump into them - this is also true of the piles of grain, which do score points, but may end your life prematurely once the last pile has been eaten or picked up.

Control of your character is a little difficult; it is only possible to go up a ladder if you are directly lined up with it. This invariably means a certain amount of shuffling back and forth before one can go up. With one of the birds approaching, this can prove rather hazardous. It is difficult to say how many screens there are, I never got past number three because I found it very difficult to jump onto the lifts at just the right point. There cannot, however, be that many because the game is only 9K long which does not leave a great amount of room for screen data.

It is a pity that all the screens are the same colour, surely the few extra bytes of colour information would have been worthwhile. The sound is also a disappointment, the game hardly stretches the machine to its limits so surely a few micro seconds could have been spent in setting up a pretty little background tune.

This game is OK as far as it goes but cannot claim to give extraordinary value for money.