Chuckie Egg

Chuckie Egg arrived in 1983 as the debut creation of then 17-year-old Nigel Alderton at A&F Software, and today we are playing it on the ZX Touch handheld with full real-time FX enhancements and comprehensive gameplay commentary. If you are new to the channel, welcome. This is the kind of classic gaming we focus on every week.

The original Chuckie Egg was an immediate sensation. Players controlled Hen House Harry, a portly character with a distinctive hat, as he collected a dozen eggs scattered across each single-screen level while avoiding patrolling chickens and the relentless caged duck watching from above. The game sold over one million copies and became a steady earner for A&F Software throughout the 1980s. It was ported across dozens of platforms including BBC Micro, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, Amstrad CPC, Acorn Electron, and later to Amiga and Atari ST.

The core mechanic was brilliantly simple but brutally challenging. Each level consisted of platforms, ladders, and occasionally moving lift platforms that required precise timing to navigate. Collecting corn suspended your countdown timer and increased your bonus score, but chickens would eat the corn if you left it unguarded, causing them to pause momentarily. One mistake usually meant death. Falling through gaps at the bottom meant losing a life. Touching a hen meant losing a life. Missing the timing on moving lifts meant losing a life.

The ZX Spectrum version ran without realistic physics, unlike the BBC Micro variant, but the screen design more than compensated. The levels were intricate works of puzzle design where knowledge of the exact route could mean beating a level with five seconds remaining or failing with fifteen. The original price of 6.90 pounds in 1983 proved justified as the game remained a steady seller for years.

Nigel Alderton went on to code other classics including Commando and Ghosts n Goblins, but Chuckie Egg remains his most celebrated work. The game is regularly cited alongside Manic Miner and Lode Runner as one of the three titles that defined the early platform game genre and introduced it to mainstream gaming audiences.

The ZX Touch handheld, released in November 2023, brings Chuckie Egg to life with real-time FX enhancements applied through firmware version 1.12 and above. The Edge Colour Shader effect enhances the colour palette and visual clarity without modifying the original code. The automatic background switching system adapts the screen appearance based on the action occurring. The optional Game Rewind feature allows you to rewind up to 60 seconds of gameplay, perfect for when you misjudge a critical jump.

This is what happens when classic 1980s design meets modern portable hardware. If you appreciate platform games that require skill and planning, games that punish mistakes but reward mastery, and honest commentary on how these decades-old classics still deliver compelling gameplay, hit subscribe and join us. We cover this scene every week.

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Deathchase

Deathchase is one of those games that absolutely refuses to be forgotten, and for good reason. Originally released in 1983 by Micromega and programmed by Mervyn Estcourt, this ZX Spectrum classic was famously squeezed into just 16K of memory, which was an extraordinary technical achievement at the time. You play as a motorcycle-riding mercenary chasing down two target bikes through a forest, one yellow and one blue, while also dealing with tanks and helicopters as the difficulty ramps up. The game ran at what felt like an impossible speed on 8-bit hardware, and that sense of urgency is still there today.

In this video we are running Deathchase on the ZX Touch, the dedicated ZX Spectrum handheld released by Elmar Electronic in late 2023. The ZX Touch is a bare-metal device, meaning it runs on direct hardware code rather than a standard operating system, powered by a 480MHz ARM Cortex-M7 processor with a 7-inch IPS touchscreen at 1024x600 resolution. What makes this run particularly interesting is the Special FX version of Deathchase, which takes advantage of the ZX Touch's real-time in-game FX enhancement capabilities built into the hardware.

There's full commentary throughout this one, covering the history, what makes this game hold up, and what the Special FX version adds to the experience. Deathchase was later re-released in 1986 and 1989, and even made The Guardian's list of the five best ZX Spectrum games ever made. That kind of legacy doesn't happen by accident.

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Manic Miner

The ZX Touch handheld console launched on November 18, 2023, and features a 7-inch IPS touchscreen running at 1024x600 resolution with a 480 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 processor. The FX system is a real-time enhancement that applies dynamic visual effects to games without modifying the original code. For Manic Miner, this includes the Edge Colour Shader, backgrounds that switch automatically between scenes, and the Game Rewind feature that lets you rewind gameplay by up to 60 seconds. These enhancements were added in firmware updates starting with v1.12 and refined in the current v1.13.

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Retro Gamer has called Manic Miner one of the most influential platform games of all time. It has been ported across dozens of systems from the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro to modern mobile phones. The ZX Touch carries 34 built-in licensed ZX Spectrum games, and supports loading thousands more via microSD card or Wi-Fi file transfer.

Manic Miner is the 1983 platformer by Matthew Smith that launched on the ZX Spectrum as a Bug-Byte release in August 1983, hitting the UK charts at number one. Today we are playing it on the ZX Touch handheld with the full FX enhancement system running real-time visual effects, and we are providing full gameplay and commentary throughout. If you are new here, welcome to the channel.

The game consists of twenty caverns, each one screen in size, where your job as Miner Willy is to collect all the flashing objects scattered across each level before your oxygen supply depletes. Once you grab everything, a portal lights up and sends you to the next cavern. The enemies you face along the way are documented in the original 1983 cassette inlay as Poisonous Pansies, Spiders, Slime, and worst of all, Manic Mining Robots that patrol predefined paths at constant speeds.

The game was designed to require pixel-perfect timing. Falls from too great a height kill you instantly, so every jump must be calculated. The controls are straightforward but executing them flawlessly under pressure is the real challenge. Extra lives are earned every 10,000 points, and the difficulty of each successive cavern was designed to drain quarters had this appeared in an arcade cabinet.

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