The 1989 MS-DOS conversion of Chuckie Egg plays okay, but I’m not sure what is going on with those graphics. They’re horrible!

When a simple game like the original Chuckie Egg gets converted to a more capable machine, there seems to be a tendency with ‘lesser’ programmers to ‘fill in the blanks’ of ’empty’ areas of the screen. What they don’t seem to realise is that this visual simplicity is an important element of the game – being able to discern foreground elements from the background. When a converting programmer (or artist) creates bold and colourful backgrounds like those seen in Chuckie Egg for DOS, there is a real danger that you’re going to end up with a mess that’s hard to unpick in your brain. Which is what has happened here. Those bright backdrops make it hard to see the eggs, the ostriches, and yourself, and they do not improve the game in any way.

Also: the collision detection around the ostriches is ridiculous. If you touch a single pixel around the ‘hit box’ of a bird: it kills you – even if you haven’t actually ‘touched’ one of the birds. Whoever made this game doesn’t seem to have bothered to make the collision routine work properly and countless times I ended up cursing the programmer who made it. These things must be fair, and the collision detection in this really isn’t.

Henhouse Harry – the main character – moves quickly and is responsive, but climbs ladders too slowly (he should climb them at the same rate he walks, but does no such thing), and his jump and bounce properties just don’t seem right.

DOS Chuckie Egg really gets my goat – it should have been more like the original and not an attempt to ‘sex things up’. In the end, it simply results in a half-baked game.

More: Chuckie Egg on Wikipedia