Chuckie Egg 2

Your Spectrum

Dave Nicholls 2/5 HIT

Roger Willis 1.5/5 MISS

Ross Holman 3/5 HIT

JOYSTICK JURY They came, they saw and they conked out - or rather the joysticks did. Dave Nicholls, Roger Willis and Ross Holman hung on just long enough to give the verdict on all the new games. CHUCKIE EGG II A 'n' F Software £7.95 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 The ladders and platforms have partly been replaced by ropes and travelators and there's not a caged bird in sight.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.

Here's your first challenge - to get past the pooch in the next screen you'll need the bone from this one. It's the only way you'll get a prolonged active life. There are extra bonus points to be had if you collect objects like this apple but they serve no other useful purpose. Watch out for your first taste of the moving meanies. You'll soon suss out that the only way to get round them is to take a running jump and hope you don't come a cropper.

You've fed Fido and you've passed A'n'F chocolate factory, so now it's on to this screen. To get through you've got to jump from chain to chain avoiding the 'armful arachnids as you go. The spiders go up and down the chains just to make life difficult for you. And they don't even travel at the same speeds - the one on the right is faster than his mate on the left. If you fail to get past them, you've have to try and try again. You can't jump over the three objects at the bottom of the screen. Well, who'd go across the top if you could?

Read it at Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive

Sinclair User

Overall 3/5

Chris Bourne 3/5

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.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Crash

Use of Computer 80%

Graphics 80%

Playability 78%

Getting Started 75%

Addictive Qualities 83%

Value For Money 81%

Overall 81%

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

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

The first chocolate factory screen where Harry must jump from chain to chain to get past the floor rings.

The intro screen to CHUCKIE EGG 2, Harry on his way down to collect the bone.

ZX Computing

Graphics 4/5

Addictivity 4/5

Overall 4/5

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.

Your Computer

Overall 3/5

Peter Connor 3/5

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.

Chucky Egg 2.