Billy Hatcher is like if Mario 64, Glover, and Super Monkey Ball had a baby.

This is such a chaotic idea for a platformer and I'm shocked we never got more than this game despite Sega treating this like one of their mega franchises back in the day.

Coming from the team behind Sonic nonetheless, comes a platformer which is probably better than a lot of the 3D sonic games.

Billy Hatcher and the giant egg is structed like a 3D Mario game where you're given a couple of worlds with multiple missions where you need to collect a "Star". This time all platforming revolves around spherical oval that we tend to call an egg.

Billy relies entirely on the egg for platforming the same way Glover relies on a ball. When you have an egg, you roll it around kinda like a super monkey ball game, but you do many tricks such as bounce, dash, shoot, pound and throw (amongst other tricks). I'm sure if you spent a lot of time with the controls, movement would be found to be deep as hell.

The gameplay loop is pretty fun. You find an egg and you can roll over fruit or enemies with the egg. The more fruit your squash, the bigger your egg becomes, the more damage your egg does to enemies. If baddies manage to break your egg then you will have to find another one and increase it's size again.

While the game is mostly good platforming fun. There are a lot frustrating moments and the game can be a bit unfair with how punishing it is. Although if you play on an emulator I recommend using an infinite lives cheat so at least you start from a checkpoint rather than starting a level all over again.

I wish Sega someday revisits this franchise, because with some even more refined controls and more intuitive level design, I can see it being a great platformer series.

This is maybe the biggest “this would be great if it was good!” game I’ve ever played. I absolutely loved Billy Hatcher but it is just a kind of middling platformer that makes the wild choice of pushing its worst levels at you first, therefore only reaching its height of “kinda fun!” halfway through, before ending with a stupidly bad final boss.

I think I’m just one of the few people who really would get as much joy from this game as I did, as frustrating as that is for me to say. Its graphics and character design and GBA link cable support add up to something that is so incredibly up my alley I became kind of obsessed! But if you just aren’t that interested in seeing kinda cute GameCube graphics animals pop out of colorful eggs then there is absolutely nothing else in the game to hook you. And its biggest flaws wouldn’t even be that hard to fix, either! I think polishing up the final boss and removing the lives system would instantly make the game leaps and bounds better.

I think if you do have some sort of interest in playing this game, whatever the reason is, it is worth trying. If you play it on emulator and don’t mind abusing save states then doubly so. I really, really hope a remake comes out someday that is more easily recommendable to more people but as is it’s still a game I enjoyed a lot.

[Average Reading Time: 8 Minutes]

My opinions on this game and my preference in how I like my eggs share one similarity: they're both scrambled.

When it comes to the plot, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg doesn't offer much of note. Billy and his friends get whisked away to a realm called Morning Land, where the chicken inhabitants are being attacked by a group of evil crows. It's your basic "Go beat up the evil dark lord bad guy" storyline that's all too common in games like this. I'm not complaining about it, though. I think the plot is fine for what it is, and they do try to add some lore here and there to keep the world interesting. I have my complaints about this game, and let me tell you the plot isn't what I take issue with here.

Let's talk about how the game works. Throughout your adventure, you're constantly running into eggs. When you start pushing them around, you gain access to a whole wealth of traversal and combat abilities. You can do a ground pound with the egg and have it launch you in the air to gain some extra height. You can shoot it at enemies and have it roll back to you. You can also use it to dash. What's weird about the dash, though, is that Billy doesn't have the dash move when he isn't pushing an egg around. Why he suddenly loses the will to pick up the pace when he isn't shoving around an egg is beyond me, but we have other pressing matters to discuss.

Throughout my playthrough of this game, one constant thought ran through my head as I engaged with the mechanics: "Wow, this game would be great if the mechanics worked more reliably!"

The ideas they present with the gameplay are neat, but in execution prove to be rather frustrating. Take the ground pound that lets you jump higher I mentioned earlier. You're going to primarily be using this to reach higher platforms. In any other game, this would be as simple as using the move and then getting on the platform. However, things are not so simple in Billy Hatcher! When you use this move, the egg and, by extension, Billy begin to spin. Now, this has no effect on the controls, but it does have an effect on what happens when you land. If you're barely making it onto a platform and Billy is over the edge when you land, he's going to drop and the egg will just be hanging out on the platform you wanted to get on, mocking you as you try to find another egg to try this again. If there's no other eggs around then you need to wait for the egg to despawn and go back to its spawn point so you can try again.

Now, you may think at first that this is just a quirky weird thing that doesn't happen too often. Oh, you ignorant fool! This happens on almost every platform in the entire game. I started forming a habit of doing two ground pound jumps before even attempting to move myself to a platform because I managed to have less arduous results when I did it. I am thankful to say that this has never caused a death during my playthrough, but it is frustrating to deal with.

What did cause deaths during my playthrough was a special object in some stages. Sometimes in stages there will be railways that you need to put your egg on, and while it's rolling away you need to maneuver yourself to a location where you can catch it before it rolls off a ledge. When you first see one of these, it immediately works as advertised. However, in later stages it, for some reason or another, becomes the most finicky thing that you will ever interact with in this game.

Allow me to describe to you how these things almost made me quit the game. So, the first mission of every world requires you to find a gold egg and hatch it. For one world, you need to move this egg across one of these rails and catch it on the other end. The problems I had here weren't with catching the egg. The problems I had were that the egg just refused to get on the rail. If I moved too quickly towards the rail, it wouldn't connect with it and the egg and I would plummet down a pit. If I moved too slowly, the egg would just fall right through the rail, which also causes death since it's an important egg. I also can't use the move that launches the egg out to get it on there because then it makes the egg move too fast, making it impossible for me to catch it, resulting in death. I had to carefully manage my speed when approaching this rail, aiming my movements at just the right angle to get the egg on there. Whoever was in charge of playtesting levels that use these things must've had some level of spite towards the developers of this game because there's no way they didn't notice this! Either that or they reported it and it was, for one reason or another, never fixed by the devs, but we'll never know the true story.

I would probably be less mad about it if death was meaningless, but you have to remember that this is 6th Gen gaming, and we're still doing the lives thing in most platformers, as it was the style at the time. Personally, I think lives counters add nothing to games outside of making things more stressful for the player, and I rarely find their inclusion in games to be something worth celebrating. When developers add a lives system to their games, they either make lives super rare, making playing stages stressful and infuriating when getting a game over, or they shower you in them, raising the question of why they even bothered with including them in the first place. There's also other things to account for, such as what happens when you get a game over in terms of progress lost, when factoring how valuable lives are, but at the end of the day I think every game that has a lives mechanic would go up 2 points if they hadn't even bothered with a lives counter in the first place.

How does this relate to Billy Hatcher, you ask? Well, lives are rare in this game, for one. I didn't find a single extra life during my playthrough. I dunno if I needed to hatch a specific egg to find one but I didn't find any during my adventure. Next, we need to talk about what happens when you get a game over. A normal game would splash a "Game Over" screen with an option to continue or to quit, with continuing taking you back to the start of the stage you were attempting. Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, like other SEGA games during this time period, take you straight back to the title screen, requiring you to go through menus and loading times before you're allowed your next attempt. I think I game over'd around 5 times during that stage I mentioned earlier, so needless to say I was not a happy camper by the time I beat it.

As you go on your journey you'll get "Emblems of Courage", which act as your main collectable for this journey. For most of the game, they don't really matter. You only need to beat the first two missions of each world to advance to the next one. This is consistent for the first five worlds of the game. Once you get to the 6th world, they have you complete a third stage. At the end of that stage, though, you are greeted with a text box telling you that you need to go back to older worlds and collect more emblems before you can beat the game, and then you're kicked out of the level! You could spend over 7 minutes going through the stage, full of deaths and frustrating egg-related platforming all for the game to say "bro look at your wallet ☠️☠️ get back with some more green my man." and throw you out! Thankfully, there's an NPC near that spot where that happens that you need to just have 25 of the things before you can beat the game, but the way the game phrases things when you get to that room makes you think you need to get all of the emblems in the previous worlds, which would've scared me away easily.

At the very least, the other missions that you would need to do to get the remaining emblems at that point are absurdly easy. They went out of their way to make the first two missions of the worlds in the back half of this game worryingly difficult, but the missions outside the first two of each world are a breeze in comparison. There are some that'll end in just a few minutes without any need for a second attempt. It's crazy! Funnily enough it was during the time I was rounding up the extra emblems that I was having the most fun with the game. There weren't many rails to worry about, there was less egg platforming that could lead to ledge issues, it was like I was playing a normal game! All I could think during all this was "Why did they hide all the easy stuff and make me suffer like they have for the past few hours?"

Each world has a boss to fight, as well. For the most part, though, they're really easy. There are some where I wish the camera would lock onto them since they move all over the place and others where it took me a try or two to figure out what they wanted from me, but for the most part they're pretty comfortable to fight. You're not going to have any worries there with this game, for the most part.

Overall, I can't say I hate Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but I can't say I like it either. A neat gimmick and an attractive world are marred by unreliable gimmicks, the trappings of the lives system, and the fact that the game waits as long as it does to tell you to go get more collectables. If this is a game that makes you curious, then I can say it's worth at least giving a shot, but I won't blame you if you want to drop it after a few worlds.

Also, ain't no way I'm going to try to 100% this game. There's no way you get something cool for finding all the emblems. Unless it makes my Wii spit out a $100 bill I ain't doing it, and I recommend you do the same. Just focus on getting enough collectables and move on. Save yourself some headache.