This game has both obsessed and frustrated me for years. I have memories of wandering around town asking computer shop owners (back when there was such thing as an independant computer store) if they had Chuckie Egg for the Spectrum or Atari ST. I encountered the game when I was at school, it was on our BBC Micro along with Granny’s Garden and some other educational crap that nobody looked at. Learn multiplication tables or try and collect eggs? Hmm… tricky choice, and probably one contributing reason to my poor maths skills.

Chuckie egg, like Tetris is a very simple game; collect the eggs, don’t fall down holes or get grabbed by the weird cyan coloured birds. It has a really nice and fluid control system that makes it a joy to play. There also isn’t much reliance on performing pixel-perfect jumps.

The only thing that hampered my game surrounded the lifts in the game. I just couldn’t time it correctly and would end up jumping into the void from which the lifts emerged. The only irritating part of Chuckie Egg is the twonky death music, and I got to hear it lots.

And so it continued, I’d get to level 3 and die hideously, every time. And unlike most games, they didn’t become easier as I got older.

So today I had a challenge, there not being much else to do beyond read or sleep in a hot tent, could I not only complete level 3, but could I become quite happy negotiating lifts? Well it took about half an hour and a bit of swearing at my DS, but I managed to crack it

The problem, that had been stumping me for all these years? It seems I was trying to be too precise for the game. There is no split-second timing required to make the yellow man jump just as a platform appears out the hole. Just jump when there’s one vaguely near the bloke’s feet, and no higher than his middle and you’ll land on it. Even if your feet clearly go through it.

All this thanks to a Spectrum emulator and my DS