Billy Hatcher and The Giant Egg

Wii, Billy Hatcher and The Giant Egg (2003), game

I like that it's so bright and happy, with jaunty, if repetitive and a little inane tunes, and colourful, if unimaginative worlds, that while not straying from the standard platformer themed locations used for their inspiration are chunky and fine to manoeuvre around within. And it is a lot about manoeuvring since you're nothing without an egg to roll in front of you as both shield and weapon, so much that if you turn too fast or go too near an edge you can lose it - worse, it can sometimes pull you down with it. The criticism I would level at the game is the same for most platformers: camera and control. Neither are terrible, nor are they really accomplished, a fair summation of the entire experience - getting stuck on a wall when you're trying to run through a gap, or the egg not being sticky enough so you don't always grip immediately and fully, and especially the camera adjusting itself independent of your control, are all annoyances. Importantly though, I did want to come back, the red Emblems attractive enough and challenging in acquisition, much like Mario's Stars or Shines, or Banjo's Jiggies, so I did have the desire to catch 'em all, if not the patience to get the last couple or so, which I assume are awarded for collecting all coins and finding all egg types. I wasn't too clear on how you were supposed to unlock the many eggs on the collection screen, whether it had to be on a run when you didn't die, or whether it was cumulative until Game Over and the last of your lives. The Game Over screen, very old-school, was really just an irritant forcing you to go through all the menus again until you get to the point where you can restart, although it also lost you any coins you'd collected, too. It wasn't a bad system, however, as it encouraged the collection of lives on later levels to avoid having to hit switches or clear rooms to progress again, and some incentive to be more careful when so many games make lives largely redundant.

The story doesn't bear consideration, but it's the gameplay that matters and this was suitably addictive. Though the levels had a certain amount of linearity to them, they were well designed in that the quest for each Emblem placed you in a different part of it, and eventually you had to know your way around the whole place for the search of the eight chickens in each, so my early impressions (inane music, gloomy opening level where you keep dying and returning to the start because it's difficult to see and know what's dangerous), were proved unfair with the dawning of morning. I'm still not sure if it was best to start out each level with the whole place dark, but once things lighten up it's good. It's really not a game designed to impress in the scale or breadth of the levels or their challenges, and they were largely repetitive, but enjoyable enough. Favourites were probably the Pirates Island and Dino Mountain areas as the opening level is conventionally basic and the later ones typically trickier to traverse with easy instant deaths over the side - one thing that annoyed me was it being so easy to die, though it adds peril to proceedings and ups the tension, it frequently took time to learn the game's flaunting of convention in that regard: you can't fall into water, sand or lava, though you can run atop an egg if you have the right hat which is found in a specific egg. Trouble is, you're very constrained by egg-top running, not allowing you to jump, except backwards, meaning if you want to get somewhere above you're forced to stand looking away from it and then jump. In all, the controls weren't the most intuitive or fair, I felt. Having to roll an egg or use it to jump was both the unique feature of the game and its downfall. Once you get used to it you can barrel around at top speed and turn on a sixpence, but there wasn't much in the way of progression to learn control, nor to understand the attributes of the eggs' items or creatures - you had to wait until exiting a level before being able to look up the corresponding information.

It wasn't a good enough game for me to want to go back and locate all the missing coins and eggs, it was enough for me to fill in all the visible Emblems on each level select, but it's good that if you really loved the experience you had the option to do more, such as improving your rating in time and fight experimentation. There's also the multiplayer Battle mode I didn't have the opportunity to try out and the Game Boy Advance linkup that I didn't have any success with, perhaps because I never found the mini-game eggs that would have made it possible. Again, I don't have the patience to go back through and unearth the missing eggs, but it's nice to have that option. With the GameCube so poorly served with the genre that had its peak on N64 (at least four good to great games, possibly more), this is one of the rare examples, along with 'Super Mario Sunshine' and… not much else. Perhaps the genre was going out of fashion even then, but there were the occasional attempts such as the 'Pac Man World' series, the only one of which I played I found to be distinctly average to poor, so this was, if not a nice surprise because I expected it to be reasonably playable, one that lived up to its Sega namesake, and indeed had hallmarks of the company at this time, such as the vocals on the theme that reminded me of their 'F-Zero GX' entry on 'Cube, and also Rare's N64 race-'em-up, 'Diddy Kong Racing,' both colourful, jaunty games.

At the same time you can see the Nintendo influence - rolling the egg over the purple shadow muck to clear it up is straight out of 'Sunshine,' and Dark Raven, the game's villain, wears the same kind of fancy coat Gannondorf wore in 'The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker,' not to mention to defeat him you have to grab his dark energy, or whatever it is, and turning it to light you roll it right back! I also found myself over-thinking things a bit: in the Circus level I tried to get higher and higher to take the golden egg to the top, forgetting all I needed to do was pump it up to hatch it, but the difficulties made me forget - trying to throw an egg onto rails where it keeps dropping into oblivion, or jumping on a rail with an egg when I needed to roll and jump, or attempting to race a rolling egg to catch it at the other end and then it doesn't stick to you, but rolls right past, was the height of frustration, and such things came across as pernickety instead of embracing and empowering the player. Consequently, it was nowhere near getting a fourth star as the gameplay was pretty basic all told, with few of the characters and sense of place that you'd find in the likes of Banjo's worlds, and a lack of experimentation and variety, definitely leaning to an older school idea of the genre rather than fully using the resources of the console and taking it further, but as one of the few options worth considering in the genre on the GameCube I would recommend it. I have no idea if the Wii fared better (especially as you could play 'Cube titles on it, which is exactly how I played it), but I highly doubt it, so I'm glad I took the time to investigate this.

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