Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg ought to have been great. At least it ought to have been very good. It is the latest offering from Sega's famous Sonic Team, the video game studio that gave the world Sonic the Hedgehog and Chu Chu Rocket! and Samba De Amigo. Some context: Sonic Team invented:

a) going really really really fast in a video game;
b) herding mice;
c) electronic maracas;
d) etc.

Sonic Team games are energetic and silly and frequently brilliant, and they usually contain funny hats. They make you want to seek out other Sonic Team games. This is a problem for poor Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. The game is energetic and silly and it contains the best funny hat in the history of Sonic Team, but it is not brilliant. It is OK. For a title from any other studio that would be good enough. Here it is practically cause for mourning.

Billy Hatcher is the hero. As the game begins, he is out in the forest with his friends. A tiny lost baby chicken hides in the grass nearby. Everything in the forest is extra cute, so the tiny lost baby chicken wears diapers.

Some evil crows fly in. Their demeanour suggests they are about to eat the tiny lost baby chicken. They grin diabolically. But before the dining can begin, young Billy grabs a fallen tree limb and bats the evil crows right across the clearing. It is a fateful moment; before you know it, Billy is being hailed as the saviour of Chicken Land. This means many serious responsibilities, but mostly it means that he must spend the rest of the game wearing a magical chicken suit with a big floopy red comb dangling off his head.

The adventuring begins abruptly. Chicken Land has gone all dark, and it is up to Billy to bring back the sunshine. The crows have captured and imprisoned the elder roosters of Chicken Land, see, and without anybody to crow at sunrise night just keeps going and going.

So, on with the rescuing. Basically Billy pushes big eggs around and looks for fun things to do with them. Great huge eggs litter the landscape, and Billy can roll any of them nearly anywhere. He can roll them into evil monsters and they will roll back to him like boomerangs. He can bounce on top of them to reach heights he could not even contemplate on his own. He can even, with practice, learn to raise them to maturity and hatch them, at which point they give up treats or funnier hats or, occasionally, animals armed with helpful magical powers. When he finds a golden egg containing a trapped elder rooster and hatches it, morning comes to that little patch of Chicken Land.

"So," you are saying at this point, "it has chickens and eggs and monsters and funny hats and bouncing. What's not to like?"

That is a good question and it deserves a careful answer. Partly the problem is inadequate editing. There are many moments where the silly fun of rolling eggs around gets annoying, and these should have been removed. Billy has a tough time hanging onto his eggs when he gets near cliffs and piers, and frequently drops the big prize over the edge. This is annoying. Billy has a tough time hanging onto his egg when walking in a circle, and when he gets his grip back he gives off a terrible childlike grunting sound. This is annoying. Billy rarely has a clear sense of what he should do to open the next door, whether it is pressing a switch or hatching another egg or persuading a snake to eat a bomb. This is annoying.

Mostly, though, the problem is chickens. Chickens suck. Sonic Team totally should have used monkeys instead.