Game:

Chuckie Egg (1983)

Duration: 3:38

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8

A playthrough of "Wallaby", another old childhood favourite, using savestates as the game (and especially the last level) is virtually impossible without. The mechanics are fairly simple, though Chuckie Egg fans may find it tricky to adjust to the fact that you can only jump to platforms at the same height as the one you are standing on. Monkeys, and mid-height apple cores, can be punched away by pressing Shift, which makes the game slightly easier on a PC keyboard. Punching the bell in mid-jump (requiring rather precise timing) makes higher-valued fruit appear in place of all the fruit already collected on a level. As with many BBC Micro games, there is no ending; completing the last level simply returns you to the first.

Jumping across two gaps with only a small platform in between, first seen on Level 3, is tricky; Level 5 is absolutely merciless with these. If you jump from too close to the end of one platform, you may overshoot the small platform and fall down the gap; you therefore have to continually pause to judge whether you need to reposition yourself. Level 5's extremely tight time limit hardly helps matters. Also, both Levels 4 and 5 have a long ladder on the far left, on which it can be tricky to evade apple cores dropped from above.

In this playthrough, on each level I strike the bell and backtrack to collect one fruit (although on Level 5, the bottom-left fruit is available before and after the bell without backtracking anyway). On Level 4, the bottom-right fruit, despite being exactly between two ladders, is only collected when moving up or down the ladder to its left.

The bell can be struck as many times per level as you have time for; after the six fruits shown here, the sequence continues with a tomato (700 points), watermelon slice (800) and Superior logo (900), after which it reverts to apples (with their old value of 100 points, not 1000).

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