Game #1150: Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

 An eggcelent pick for game #1150.

 As far as games I've always wanted to play but never could, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is a prime offender as the game was only available on the Gamecube... and as a rather obscure PC port. Regardless, my adult life is all about fulfilling my childhood wants and needs, so here we are.

 This is one weird platforming game, as you take control of a character dressed like a chicken. By himself, Billy is pretty much useless, being only able to jump or cockadoodledoo. Billy's full moveset is only available once you grab onto an egg. Now you can ground pound, bounce-jump, dash or shoot the egg towards incoming enemies. You can also simply just roll-over enemies to kill them. You can find fruit, hidden in the environment or dropped from fallen enemies, in order to feed the egg, just roll with it, and once it glows gold you can use the cockadoodledoo to hatch the egg. It may contain a helper animal, a 1-UP, or other power ups such as powering your egg with different elements or giving you remote control over eggs.

 Initially, every level starts with 5 available missions, but as you rescue Billy's friends you'll open up 3 extra missions in every world in which you play as them. It's just cosmetics since they play exactly like Billy. There are 7 worlds with a total of 8 missions each. The first two missions are the only ones you must finish in order to open up the next world, the first has you finding the golden egg and then hatching it without it breaking and the second one is an easy boss battle. The next 6 missions are made up of a coin-collecting mission, a boring find 8 chickens missions, a defeat 100 enemies mission as well as other objectives such as reaching a specific place. It can be a bit predictable at times, but since every world is quite different, it's not as repetitive as it could've been.

 I enjoyed the originality and the game mechanics a fair bit, but it does have a few glaring shortcomings. Some jumps are just nasty, as it's all too common for your egg to reach the top of a ledge, but not your character. When this happens you must wait for the egg to de-spawn and re-spawn. If you're lucky you'll have access to another egg for a quick attempt, but if it happens again, you are screwed. If the platform is large enough you could try to air-dash after the jump, but some platforms are too small for this to work. Red rails are pretty nasty too, while you can ride on them on your eggs, sometimes your character will just drop off the ledge. It's better to approach them with a jump. On that note, some of the latter levels feel unfair in their difficulty, the last world in particular relies on slopes and rails, and if you don't get the jump just right you're going to lose a life. The final boss was kind of annoying too, as some of its attacks require some pixel-perfect cleaning(it makes sense in context) for it to work. Oh! And the camera, while serviceable most of the time, is too slow and cumbersome during boss fights. Luckily, every boss but the last one is very easy, but still, you will take some hits because there was no way to redirect the camera fast enough towards the boss.

 Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is a clear case of the good overweighing the bad. Its flaws can be quite annoying at times, but at the end of the day, the game's highly original take on the genre is quite a treat, and when the mechanics work, they work well, playing the game is a lot of fun and at times it felt like an Arcade game, thanks to its speedy, score-based gameplay. The colorful graphics, and the child-like aesthetics also make it impossibly cute and charming. At the end of the day, I can understand why this is such a cult-classic. Sega, where's the sequel?

 7.5