What is it?
John Blythe wrote his first Chuckie Egg
remake in 1999. Straightforwardly enough, as Kurt Vonnegut Jr would
say, he called it Chuckie Egg '99. It seems to have never gone past
version alpha 0.30, but nevertheless was quite popular for a while.
Now it has completely vanished from the web, all that's left is the
single screenshot you see at the right. Judging from that, it used
a very uncommon 320×200 hi-color mode.
So Chuckie Egg '99 is dead—long live Chuckie Egg: The Next Batch! Don't worry, with a few caveats, this is one of the best or maybe even the best Chuckie Egg remake in existence.
Let's cover the caveats first. To whom it may concern, The Next Batch is not an exact reproduction of the original Chuckie Egg. The level layout is slightly different, and the mother hen has been replaced with a strange flying duck or albatross, you can see it in the bottom left corner. The screenshot was taken the very moment the level loaded, a fraction of a second later I had lost the first life with no way to avoid it. A more serious problem is that jumping is rather awkward: You always jump a fixed distance in the direction you are facing. It takes some getting used to.
Now that's out of the way, what's so great about the game? Mainly the graphics. The key to a successful remake is handling the graphics right. Especially with 8-bit games, this is not easy. The idea is to stay true to the original but still give an enhanced experience. The remake should be better, else what for make a remake at all? The Next Batch keeps this balance admirably.
The graphics are better than a static screenshot can convey. It might seem that the background is too noisy, making it difficult to discern the eggs and corn heaps (this was an issue with the official 16-bit ports), but the grid part of the background scrolls, so it never becomes a problem. Of course there are details that could have been handled better. The shading is a bit amateurish, especially with the pipes, the eggs float in mid-air, and straight rungs for the ladders would probably have looked better, since the break is all too visible.
But these are minor details. On the whole, The Next Batch is not only probably the best Chuckie Egg remake, but a good example for a well-done remake in general.
About This File
This is not the latest version of the game, which you can get from the author's website. It is a slightly older one, 1.1. You can't run this one in a window, but it has an icon, and I'm a bit of an icon fetishist.
