#31 - Alfred Chicken

Somebody's setting him up the bomb... wait? Free poster? I bet that's worth some change now.



It's a real WING-ding!!!... ::sigh::

Oh yeah, baby! This is the game I have been waiting to review! The game that makes all of the other Nintendo games I've reviewed look like complete backwards trash! This is the OG right here, ALFRED CHICKEN! Jklolz, this game is just ok, nuthin special. AC was quietly released in Feb. 1994 by Mindscape Entertainment, a few months before the NES' untimely demise. It is a weird, quirky, childish platformer that would be below average if it wasn't so determined to be a freak among the NES' already filled-to-the -brim platforming library.

The game is fairly short spanning only five levels, but if you're into straight-up mind-trippery, you should probably give it a shot. You star as Alfred Chicken and your goal is to make it through a strange land filled with cheese, snails, balloons, and smiling sunflowers. If this sounds like an intentional acid trip, it is (maybe). It definitely feels like it's trying to capture that Mario-esque sense of weird, but Mario did it naturally, and it played like a champ. Alfred Chicken throws in everything it can to weird out the player, and it does, but in more of an unsettling, creepy way. I highly doubt this was the point, as the game was very much made for kids, but the creepiness remains.

It doesn't help that the graphics look very archaic, especially for 1994 NES standards. This might have to do with the fact that the NES version of Alfred Chicken is a colorized port of the Game Boy version, but it wouldn't have hurt Mindscape to spruce up the visuals a tad. The music is about as far removed from "pleasing" as music can be. Like the game's overall feel, the music seems designed to make you feel uneasy and horrified. Just listen to the title screen if you don't believe me; the obvious attempts at chicken sounds are the prime offenders. Control is decent, especially when you consider that you're controlling a chicken. Alfred jumps well, and his primary defense is pecking things. The latter works better than it should, which is good because, like many NES games, Alfred's world is a land of one-hit kills.

Basically, the only reason to play this game is because it's weird as hell. Otherwise it's an average platformer starring another me-too sidekick in the era when Mario and Sonic were the only ones that mattered.

C-

An incredibly disturbing children's cartoon...