Alfred Chicken (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
40Alfred Chicken is a platformer, developed by Twilight and released by Mindscape in 1993.
Here are my notes from this show: https://www.patreon.com/posts/rough-notes-from-125261450
I was never really any good with it, so lets see if things have improved lately?
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Recorded: 16th March 2024
Narrated: 3rd March 2025
Uploaded/available to backers: 26th March 2025
Show Notes: Β Β /Β rhttps://www.patreon.com/posts/rough-notes-from-125261450ed Voice Message: Β Β /Β ahttps://soundcloud.com/cringe-audio/alfred-chicken-nintendo-phonered Chicken is one of those platfomers which always seemed a bit too cutesy for me, with that music and those graphics. When I joined the SuperLeague compo in 2011, a player (Shawn Dimery) voted for this game, and I basically put him down about it. We later almost started this channel together. So I thought it was only fitting to review a game which I almost vowed never to review, to thank Shawn, and to come full circle on this tour of Amiga classics. It's been an eventful 14 years on the scene, but I dont regret covering or not covering most of the games, with maybe a few exceptions.
This series was all wrapped up late last year (2024), but after taking a Holiday back to Benidorm, I still had maybe 6 more games to start the editing on, which took until February to get most of those done. In March 2025, I had one final game remaining to edit - this one. I had not narrated it yet, and had only the raw footage and no editing done whatsoever! So it was made almost from scratch.
These reviews take a whole month to get them looking great, but I cut some major corners a few years ago, so I could make 24 shows per year instead of just 12, one per month. This meant more shows, but they had less content within each one. As this was the final show of this series, and for the near foreseeable, I decided to spend a whole month on it, and to add all those little extra bits that normally I dont have time for. That included the return of the Comparison Zone, images of the creators, and for each magazine review.
Before I did the narration, I thought about how the review would go. Most of the ideas which came in to my mind were to mock the fact that a simple character swap could transform this game into anything. I came up with a list of 20 random characters, and was going to talk about those. Not sure how much I mentioned this in the review, but I did change the main character to some other Amiga characters, which was actually quite fun.
Danscore:
1993 was the last Hurrah for the Amiga. New AGA machines were out, and selling well. Indeed, the early 90s saw more people getting Amigas and second hand Amigas than ever before. The magazines were the biggest selling mags in their countries. Copied games were everywhere, but 90s kids were now rich enough to be able to buy or afford just about anything. But the times were changing rapidly. The Japanese quality sound and graphics of the SNES and SMD in the developed console market made people demand more from games. Development of the latest high end systems like the 3D0 and the 32X had already started. While Commodore lagged behind the CD market with the CDTV 3 project, known as the CD32; which was an unexpanded A1200 in a small box, and offered no incentive to buy one over getting the full A1200 computer with a keyboard and a Hard Drive!
Alfred Chicken was a cartoon-style in-house project, developed by cartoon I.P wizards Twilight; who had already made some classic games on the 8-bit computers, and were keen to step up to the 16-bits. But the final platforming romp feels more like an 8-bit game, but with more modern graphics. The platforming is fairly mindless, and having to dive upon every enemy rather than peck them or shoot a projectile seems fairly childish to hardened Amiga gamers. Perhaps it was trying to appeal to 6-12 year olds, but then why enter a man in a chicken suit into the European Parliament Election? Surely this would only be noticed by adults who happen to read the tabloids, and not usually what a kid back in the day would do. There are no copper backgrounds like Robocod, and the backdrop suffers the same issue as many, in that it can be hard to tell what is background, and what is safe to stand on in the foreground. The game offers no high speed Sonic The Hedgehog moments like Tearaway Thomas, or Wiz N Liz, or Zool. There are no progressive beat em up sections like Lionheart or Wolfchild. There is no sense of exploration and adventure like Woody's World or Jim Power, or Risky Woods, or Turrican. One touch of an enemy of spike means going all the way back. So I give this 6/10. It's not broken, but it's just a bit too tame for me.