Gamer's Month - Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

So you know all about eggs right? Chicken lays egg, egg hatches into chick, chick grows up, repeat ad infinitum.



No. No you are terribly wrong. So sit down and watch as I spin this shit to you.



Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: SEGA
Platform: Gamecube
Release Year: 2003

Once upon a time there was a young boy named Billy. Billy Hatcher to be exact. Why did his parents name him that? I don't know. One day Billy saved a lil' chick from some punkass crows and got sent to a magical place called Morning Land, finding himself dressed up in a Chicken Suit.



It was like some kind of dream-come-true. And thus began the adventures of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. It was developed by Sonic Team back in 2003 when they decided to take a break from making ten shithouse Sonic games a year and develop something that was actually playable.

It plays like your standard adventure-platformer. Billy rolls around giant eggs and makes them grow by defeating enemies with it and rolling over fruit.. When they get big enough he can awaken the egg with a hilariously engrish cock-a-doodle-do that reveals small animals inside. The animals inside have assorted powers that help Billy defeat the crows that are hellbent on submerging the world in darkness, because Crows are jerks.

It runs off the old Sonic Adventure 2 engine, but for some reason isn't plagued with nearly as many horrible camera issues like SA (and it also doesn't suffer from being shit like SA2 either, amazingly enough). Billy has few offensive options available to himself, so rolling around with an egg is the way to go. There's no shortage of bouncing, running, and jumping through NiGHTs style rings to be found over the course of the games seven worlds, all with sunny themes like Forest Village, Pirates Island and Dino Mountain. However, the Circus world is the stuff of nightmares.



Your objective is the free the Elder Chickens (I know, it sounds absurd) in order to restore morning and order to the world by defeating the Crows. Doing so makes you a better person, so do it properly! Billy has several allies at his disposal as well, such as Rolly Roll and big Bantam, but most of them aren't available until later in the game.



BH&TGE also features an extremely upbeat and amazing soundtrack done by two of SEGAs lesser known composers, Mariko Nanba and Tomoya Ohtani. If you haven't heard it yet I'd highly recommend seeking it out. Overall the game is pretty average, but it makes for a nice short distraction at a time when the GameCube was still struggling to find a decent library of games.

While it's not their strongest offering of recent, I have my reasons for using a silly game like Billy Hatcher. I grew up on Sega and Sonic, if it isn't obvious enough by my name. Sure I owned an NES like everyone else, but it's thanks to the Genesis and stuff like Comix Zone, Mutant League Football, Road Rash, the original Madden, Ecco, Mortal Kombat, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, After Burner, and of course the original Sonic trilogy, that I'm into games as heavily as I am today. And don't even get me started on their later offerings, like the incredible Shenmue as Omagnus has mentioned, and pretty much everything on the Dreamcast.

Watching Sega self-destruct their way into the new millennium will always be the saddest thing ever but it's the small stuff like Billy Hatcher that reminds me that they haven't completely gone under yet. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo may own the Console market, but there's only one company I'll always swear undying allegiance to.

Sega for life, bitches.

Jam it back in, in the dark.