It's hard to make out the lyrics because the compression is so terrible, but it sounds like it's the tale of a tragic love between chicken and hunter. Even the gunshots are drowned out by the tweets, which misses the entire point of ambient noise! Stranger yet is the song that plays on the title screen. Hotwire has no engine noises, no tires squealing, just birds chirping. Sometimes, that's the only sound there is. Birds of various sorts chirp endlessly in every minigame.
Every game has the same uninspired ambient noise in it. The car is so tiny that the point of the stylus covers it up completely and the track is so boring that it's not worth playing long enough to crash three times. The road gets increasingly windy and the speed progresses until the player crashes too much. Players use the stylus to control the chicken as he races along a narrow road floating in the sky. It's about as exciting as when this game is in the back of a Highlights magazine. Two images and the player finds the three differences. Spot the Difference is exactly what it sounds like. That is until the timer ran out and we realized there is only one level, thus ending any potential fun we might have had. It mixes a puzzle game with a shooting range fairly well and we found ourselves almost enjoying it. Color coded chickens that drop gems fly above the level and players have to get them to drop the right gems to match a pattern displayed. Gems is actually the most interesting game in the collection. At least Classic had the chickens occasionally popping up in humorous places, and reminded us of an amusement park shooting range. Well, at least there are other games, right? Like Weights, where the player has to shoot color coded weights at the matching chickens, trying to weigh them down enough to kill them. See+that+background+of+the+kart+racing+chicken?+It+never+moves. There is only one level, and only one difficulty setting, which means that it takes a minute and a half to play this game completely. The object is to tap the chickens to shoot them, killing as many as possible in a minute and a half. Players can scroll left and right on the panoramic farm scene and watch little rendered chickens walk or fly by. The Classic game is like duck hunt, but they added chickens and removed the fun. Chicken Hunter is a compilation of the Moorhuhn games, featuring a version of the classic shooter, as well as a few spinoffs: Weights, Gems, Spot the Difference, and Hotwire.
We can't say what the appeal is exactly, but we suspect it stems from the sense of schadenfreude they get from killing chickens.
There are Moorhuhn competitions online and the chicken has become a bit of an icon. Over in Deutschland, Moorhuhn is wildly popular, spawning numerous sequels and spinoffs. It was, instead, a rotten egg.Ĭhicken Hunter is actually the German game, Moorhuhn. Unfortunately, Chicken Hunter was not a German delight like their wacky version of chocolate cake. So when we got a hold of Phenomedia's Chicken Hunter, we went into it with the same excitement we have when we're about to listen to oom-pah music.
Great things come from Germany: beer, bratwurst, Haribo candy, techno music.