| Billy
Hatcher and the Giant Egg (Gamecube)
There are things in this world that, regardless
of their flaws, are capable of making you grin involunarily. Good
music does it, a small sub-section of my DVD and video shelf has
the knack, the better class of drugs are obviously in with a shout,
someone offering to do the washing up is a dead cert, and slightly
eccentric pictures with titles like “I lovE MummY”
always appeal to a certain portion of the population.
Well, add Billy Hatcher to the list.
I could sit here and whinge about the faults
of this game and make it sound like the dullest thing imaginable,
but the truth of the matter is simple – it’s fun.
Remember fun? It’s what we did before polygons and fill-rates
and DirectGL acceleration. Fun. It’s just fun. You really
don’t mind that half the time you can’t see where
you’re going, that Billy has a tendency to walk into the
landscape and get stuck. You don’t mind that some of the
latter levels feel a bit forced. Because, at the end of the day,
you’re controlling a small boy in a chicken suit, trying
to save Morning Land from evil crows.
Evil crows not pictured.
Read that bit again… You’re controlling
a boy in a chicken suit, trying to save Morning Land from the
evil crows. It could almost be the back plot for Chuckie Egg.
This is the 21st century. Everyone in the videogame
industry – gamers included – seems to be obsessed
with reality; ragdoll physics, 64-bit texturing, the individual
trajectories of thousands of bullets on a simulated mission to
assassinate the president of a not-so-fictional Middle Eastern
rogue state. Just where have all the daft plots gone? Maybe we’re
not supposed to need them anymore – after all, realism is
the new black.
Boingy boingy boingy…
Happily, no-one seems to have told Sega. It’s
the same trick they pulled with Super Monkey Ball – taking
a fairly tired and tested gameplay mechanic (in this case, it
may help if you think of it in terms of the bastard offspring
of Pacman and Mario) and then pulling a visual switch that is
powerful enough for you to constantly sit up and think to yourself:
“Hang on a minute? I’m controlling a boy in a magic
chicken suit rolling eggs down a hill?” Did I mention that
the chicken suit was magic? Well, there you go – it’s
magic and it’s great. You even get to wear different hats.
Big Dave, a bricklayer from Hull,
has been playing Billy Hatcher…
And that’s really all you need to know.
This game will make you laugh like a little girl and you will
perservere with it – warts and all – until you’ve
seen every single thing that it has to offer. And then you’ll
do it all again, trying to maximise your scores for each level
in the quest to attain something higher than a ‘C’
rank. It won’t stop there either as, when you’ve mastered
that, you will do it all again in multiplayer mode with your mates,
by which time Sonic Team will hopefully be close to releasing
a sequel…
RODENT CASH RATING -
£35
 "I
dip my eggy bread in Irn Bru!"
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