Chuckie Egg

March 28, 2003 7:06 AM

Chuckie EggIt’s not quite a Friday Flash Game, and it’s not quite a discussion of the great 8-bit games we played when we were young, but it seems to fall neatly between the two camps, so I thought I’d post it. For those of you on the other side of the pond, Chuckie Egg was one of the biggest selling games here in the U.K. For those of you who hanker for the old days of your BBC Micro, here’s a little bit of ‘80s magic. PC only, but it’s less than 200K of download, and as an extra bonus, it allows you to create your own levels.
posted by seanyboy (9 comments total)

That Chuckie dude looks suspiciously like someone I used to waste a lot of time with on my old Atari 800 computer.
posted by delapohl at 7:13 AM on March 28, 2003

Great. Manic Miner is available for Windows too.
posted by BigCalm at 7:22 AM on March 28, 2003

In the age of Unreal Tournement, it's hard to believe we ever accepted graphics like that.
posted by crunchland at 7:24 AM on March 28, 2003

I don't need Manic Miner for windows anymore, since I got my Spectrum 48K from ebay for thirty squids. I find that plugging the speccie into my winTV card does the job nicely, and waiting for games to load off tape gives me time to make a nice cuppa first. It doesn't have Chuckie Egg though, so cheers seanyboy. Nostalgia: it isn't what it used to be.
posted by walrus at 7:42 AM on March 28, 2003

I remember playing on an old BBC machine (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) in the untamed wilds of Cheam lo these many years ago. I think the only games he had were Snooker and this peculiar game called Chiller which was an odd rip-off of the Thriller video. There were, you know, some blips. And you were this other blip that was sort of green and red. And you had to collect as many little blue blips as you could before the other blips ate you.
Gee, when I say it that way it sounds kind of silly.

But the kids today don't know true appreciation of video games. Let me tell you, when you've waited twenty minutes for a casette tape to run, just to load video Snooker, and four times out of five you haven't set the volume wheel exactly right, you for damn sure are going to sit there for 6-8 hours enjoying the crap out of the game, if only so you don't have to load it again.
posted by Kafkaesque at 8:33 AM on March 28, 2003

Kaf: Ah, the joys of tape player volume levels.

But the BBC Micro had excellent versions of Defender & Pac Man.

>LOAD "DEFENDER"

*waits & prays*
posted by i_cola at 8:52 AM on March 28, 2003

Tape Load Error

Still brings a chill to my spine.
posted by Frasermoo at 8:53 AM on March 28, 2003

IIRC, the Beeb used to give an error message as soon as it failed to load a block but with Sinclair-type machines you had to wait until the end of the program until you found out.
posted by i_cola at 9:29 AM on March 28, 2003

walrus: Why would you plug a real Speccy into your winTV card when you can get perfectly good (and free) Spectrum emulators? I used to have a collection of about 50 Spectrum classics. And they all loaded first time, instantly!
posted by salmacis at 11:46 AM on March 28, 2003