 Thanks to LHC Gregg for requesting this one on my Patreon page. It's Super Alfred Chicken. Yup, it's another mascot platformer, although this one does at least have a little bit of history to it. The Alfred Chicken series was developed in the UK and started on the Game Boy, before being ported to the NES and the Amiga. Super Alfred Chicken on the SNES is more of a sequel than a port of any of those games, although it does reuse a few sprites from the Amiga version. And yeah, this is a platformer all right? It's the platformiest platformer in all of platform land. There's 21 levels here, and each is structured like a giant room more or less. You have to make your way across and find the exit while avoiding enemy obstacles like snails, whales, windup mice, and what the manual refers to as evil mecha chickens. If this doesn't sound all that exciting, that's because it isn't. This is a slowly paced game that's mostly predicated on jumping and dodging. You do have a couple of attacks, like diving down with your beak, you can peg at stuff, and eventually you find projectile weapons that just kind of emit from the chickens body somehow. I mean, what exactly is he shooting here, and how is he shooting it? Anyway, each level is scattered with checkpoints made up of these balloons that you peck at. You get a certain number of lives to complete the level, use up all your lives, and you have to use a continue and start all the way at the beginning of the level. And you also have diamonds to collect throughout the game, and you'll never guess what happens when you get 100 of them. You get an extra life, how about that? The gameplay here is very standard, regular, ordinary, platforming stuff. There is at least a password system here though, so it's not like if you want to finish the game you have to do it all in one sitting, so that's nice. Chances are you'll be using them often as well, because this game has one hit deaths, so that kind of sucks. Usually when the gameplay is so utterly average like this, especially in a platformer, you have to look for other aspects for it to stand out. Like for example, Kendo Rage is interesting because not much was changed when it was localized, so the story and visual presentation are somewhat interesting. Or in something like Hook, which has a surprisingly really good soundtrack. Super Alfred Chicken on the other hand, well, there's not much story here, the color palette is kind of flat, I mean this looks much more like an Amiga game than a Super Nintendo game beyond the recycling of certain sprites. And if anything, the soundtrack kind of gets annoying after a while. There are some little wrinkles here and there that try and set this game apart from all the other similar platformers, for example Alfred can float for quite a long ways if you hold on to the jump button, and there are some puzzle elements scattered throughout, like these switches you have to pack to keep the ceiling from crushing you, or unlocking other parts of the level by activating blocks. But I have to say, if you want a puzzle platformer, you're much better off with something like the Lost Vikings, or Krusty's Super Funhouse, or even stuff like Out of This World. The Alfred Chicken series continued on Game Boy Color in 2000, which was only released in Europe, and even received a title on PlayStation in 2002, so somebody somewhere must have been buying these games. But yeah, that's really all there is to say here. Is it possible for something to be aggressively ordinary? Because Super Alfred Chicken is aggressively ordinary. The controls are fine, and there are at least some mild puzzle elements here and there. But like I said, there's a number of puzzle platformers you're much better off playing over this. It's just too slow paced, too bland, too ordinary. Super Alfred Chicken isn't bad, but it's definitely not that good either.