Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

Bring the morning back to Morning Land! The adventure of Billy Hatcher begins!

NA release: 23rd September 2003
JP release: 9th October 2003
EU release: 31st October 2003
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega
NGC Magazine Score: 86%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg marks the first time that Sonic Team developed a game that wasn’t a port or collection of older titles. This is an egg-based platformer that has some similarities to Glover, but is actually good. A large part of this is because eggs are useful tools that enhance your movement and abilities, instead of being something that’s a pain to look after.

Billy Hatcher, while on his own, is rather useless. He can’t attack and his jump is quite weak. Grab an egg, however, and he can run, defeat enemies and bounce the eggs to perform bigger jumps. There are different types of rings to jump into to launch the egg (with Billy holding on for dear life) in different ways to traverse the colourful environments – well, colourful once you free the elder from the dark first mission of each world.

Billy Hatcher is structured much like Super Mario 64. There are multiple “courage emblems” (stars) to collect, each one you select from a menu. This alters the level for that one specific emblem. The differences between how the levels are structed between missions are much bigger than seen in Mario games (and you start the level in different places), but you’ll still be doing the same parts multiple times and it won’t be long to figure out that each level is essentially a giant circle, where you’ll eventually reach the start.

The first two missions in each world are the main ones. First, you have to rescue a chicken elder, then you’ll have to find and defeat a boss. The rest are more action or puzzle-focused that involve collecting coins, killing enemies or smashing eggs into things. You’ll also see a few where you move other objects, such as a snowball or fireworks, which is always nice to see. A large part of these missions will involve hatching the eggs.

While the basic speckled egg is empty, other eggs will have useful goodies inside. Some will have items that can restore health, some will boost your attacks with elemental effects and some will grant temporary abilities such as being able to roll on top of eggs. A large part of these are eggs that contain animal buddies, which are companions that will give you special abilities that can be used to solve puzzles or attack enemies. There are even some secret eggs. To hatch eggs, you’ll first have to make them grow.

Dotted throughout the levels are fruit that your egg can collect, these are also dropped by enemies. As your egg grows, the feel of it changes, they do more damage but it seems more difficult to aim jumps. You can keep an egg as it’s maximum size if you wish, although the glowing effect is quite annoying. Some puzzles will also require a heavier egg to activate switches, so this is also involved in puzzles. There’s always an egg nearby in case you need it, as they can get chipped and destroyed.

Enemies come in various different types, although are easy to deal with once you have their attack patterns sorted out. They actually remind me a lot of Sonic Unleashed, with the dark crows creating larger enemies. You can squash enemies with your egg, or yo-yo your egg into them. Bosses are also a case of dodging until you find an opening to attack (except for a final boss, where you have to clean up goo and it barely works). Also included are a few GBA minigames (some were available somewhere within Phantasy Star Online).

ChuChu Rocket! Challenge

This is essentially a demo of the GBA game, featuring 25 puzzles to solve. Good fun.

Nights into Dreams: Score Attack

A really nice recreation of the first Nights into Dreams level. There are some nifty background effects to create a 3D look and it plays like the Saturn original. There’s no boss stage, you just repeat until you run out of time.

Hyper Shoot

This is a GBA port of a lost java game released as part of the Sonic Cafe service in Japan (this had many Sonic games which are now unplayable). It’s a Space Invaders-style shooter where you launch your egg into enemies. It’s a shame they didn’t do this with more Sonic Cafe games

Puyo Pop

The endless modes from the Puyo Pop GBA game. You can play regular endless or a mission mode where you have to score specific chain amounts or clear a certain number of beans. A nice bonus.

Billy Hatcher is a really fun platformer, but seems to lose a bit of steam near the end. While it should have expanded upon its mechanics, it seems to fizzle out and have more frustrating timed objectives instead, with unfair and even broken level elements (there’s one bit of egg railing that has no collision). It’s a shame, because it starts so well. Even with that, it’s still really good fun to play.

Fun

It’s far better than any of regular Sega mascot Sonic’s excursions into 3D, which is reason enough for a more polished sequel. Sales of this game will determine whether that happens, and while we’d love to see this at the top of the charts, where it belons, it’s more likely that Billy Hatcher will be one of those games treasured and sought after in ears to come by the privileged, enlightened few.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #87

Remake or remaster?

As it only came out on GameCube and PC (with the PC version being a very shoddy port), a rerelease with some tweaks and fixes would be wonderful.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to buy Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg.