Chuckie Egg

The Good
Chuckie Egg was one of those games everyone had, everyone liked and nobody had a bad word to say about, but nobody got excited about.It stood out at the time as a whimsical game, at a time when most machine's catalogues consisted of text adventures, pac man clones and space battle shoot 'em ups that bore an uncanny resemblance to well known arcade classics. The Dragon version of Chuckie Egg is pretty much as you would expect- with a green background and the usual red-blue-yellow color suite. The game play is among the best of the various versions, a strong feature of a game that varies in difficulty between ludicrously hard and mind numbingly easy depending on which platform you are on. In this case the pitch is about right, and if you like the game it is worth checking out the Dragon version.

The Bad
Considering that they later produced a remarkably complex second game, Screaming Abdabs, which was a sort of souped up 35 screen Jet Set Willy clone, Chuckie Egg does not really push the boundaries in terms of levels of inventiveness or depth. Its sound does not really match that of games just a year or two later, although for its time it was about par for the era. Mind you that era was full of early games shunted over from the 16 k TRS-80 CoCo, most of which were underwhelming in the sound department to say the least. The machine could do so much more.

The Bottom Line
Basically what you expect- a great whimsical game of its time on the machine, but without the depth of later releases.