Chicken Jockey
by Hafiz Kassam
Visit the Chicken Jockey Website
Visit the Chicken Jockey Website
Chicken Jockey is a unique game in which you raise your chicken for the big race!
| In this game, your goal is to bet on and raise chickens for racing purposes. Simple, no? | |
| Amazingly simple idea, yet hard to master. That is usually the idea behind fun games, and many have been made that fit this idea. Tetris, Othello, and others have been successful and timeless because of their ability to be played by anyone, yet challenging enough for even experts. Chicken Jockey has the potential to be like that and comes close. The idea is that you buy and raise chickens for the big race. Of course, it takes money to raise chickens, and you can take out loans (up to $50) to help pay for the upkeep. Of course, that won't allow you to raise the world's best chicken, so you will have to raise money in other ways, namely betting on cock fights. You can bet on your own chicken, but you can also bet on other chickens if you think that your chicken just isn't a good fighter. You can even bet on fights that other chickens will fight in. Another way to win money is to bet on races. It can be difficult at first, but after a few days, it can be easy to see which of the chickens have the best breeding. It can be especially easy if you train your chicken well with your winnings. Yes, there is a Chicken Gym, where you can pay for training programs. Results may vary(I liked that one...hehe) but once you make enough money to put your chicken through a few training programs, your chicken will kick butt in the fights and also in the races. Even though there are three difficulty levels, it is not that hard to play once you set yourself up with a well-trained chicken. The other chickens just won't be able to touch yours. It is because of this that the game gets kind of old quickly. Still, the game just doesn't end after the last race. You get the option to continue on. Your stats are saved so you can proudly show off your chicken's win-loss record to your friends. And you can keep improving. Of course, you can try to raise another chicken and give it away to see if you can have more of a challenge. Not only does this game exist as a regular game in itself, you can also send your chickens to the website and find out the results of the races between other people online. It may not be completely online gaming, but it is close for QBasic. In general the game design is pretty good. I saw little trouble, except that sometimes the results of a match/race look different than what you thought you saw, such as a chicken that you know won a very close race coming in 4th. It is very odd, but it is rare. |
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| One word: cute. Most of the game is done in SCREEN 12, and it was not utilized too well; however, the chickens themselves look really nice in their simplicity. The menu for betting changes to SCREEN 13 for some reason, and it doesn't seem to add much to the game at all. A lot of this game is based on text, and they are easy to see. The menus do not all look the same though. Sometimes you have to press the arrow keys to move the cursor, sometimes to change the amount of money, and sometimes you have to type in your choices. I don't think that was done well, but at least it tells you what to do each time. The only thing the game doesn't tell you on screen is that if you press ESC, you will exit the game. The animation is almost nonexistant except in the cockfights. I like how the chickens actually peck at each other, and I would like to see more action in the sequel, which is in the works and should provide a lot more options. Also, the bar graphs are done nicely to show stats, but it is too bad you can't just look at these stats unless you are starting a fight or a race. It should be part of the YOUR STATS section, but the only info you get there is the overall health and fitness of your chickens and the amount of feed you have for them. Hopefully this will change in the sequel. Again, I would like to see more animation and more detail. The race and cockfight arenas are basically boxes. There are no backgrounds or other images, and sometimes when you are watching your chickens in their pen, if they overlap, the circles that are being drawn to make them tend not to be filled, and sometimes they leave behind droppings because of a sloppy cleanup job when moving them. It is forgivable since it doesn't detract much from the game, but hopefully it can be fixed in the sequel as well. | |
| There really isn't much to say about this. You pick choices. Press any key to do this or that. You don't have a real time effect on the chickens. So you simply pick choices. Very easy to do, and if you don't know what to do, then you aren't reading the screen. Still, sometimes it would be nice to have some consistency in the menu system. I really like how betting works out though. You can press up or down to increase or decrease your bet, but you can also move left or right to do so in increments/decrements of 10. Still, other parts of the game let you type in a number, so I don't understand why one method or the other couldn't have been used throughout. | |
| None. | |
| As I mentioned before, this game provides a slight challenge at first but gets easier later. The main difficulty in the beginning is making sure you have enough money to buy the right feed and to train the chicken well. Cockfights are your betting grounds, and once you raise enough money there, it becomes easier to train and such, and so it becomes easier to beat other chickens in fights. This in turn makes it easy to make money to train more, and eventually you can win races in two second instead of six seconds. You win more money, easier to win races, and if you can win regular races, you can win the tournament. I think if the game is to have much of a challenge at all, it is to race against time. The races should be at a set time, and you should only be able to train and do other things within that time. The game keeps track of the days for you. It shouldn't be that hard to make races occur on certain days instead of whenever you are ready. Unfortunately, you can train your chicken until its stats are maxed out before you want to start the first race, so it is very easy to win the races and the tournament after that. All you need is one chicken, and it doesn't matter which one. You can train any of them to be the best easily. | |
| Still, with all of its bad qualities, I found this game to be quite fun. It is like managing a fighter: diet, training, and psyche all matter. I like the options available, although more depth would be nice. After it gets too easy and I win too many races with record times, I am more likely to start a new game or get a new chicken (or two). It is also kind of fun since two players can play on the computer at once. If you can find a friend who might be interested, it can be fun to watch your chickens duke it out and see who trained the better fowl. | |
| I like this game for its simplicity and ease of use. It can be fun, and you might just find yourself cheering on your chicken, whether with a friend or on your own. Well done for the most part, there is nothing that stands out to make you think this game is bad. Then again, not too much stands out from this game to suggest it is great, but it has potential. A sequel is in the works that should improve upon this game, and I hope to see it soon. | |
| .zip file: 52KB download | |
| V Planet |