Game Art and Machinima Research: Mort the Chicken

By Meg Sugden
The next game that I wanted to look at is Mort the Chicken. This is quite a strange little game that follows Mort the Chicken and his journey to save all of the chicks after they have been taken by the enemy in the game. His mission is to bring them all home to safety in this strangely-blocky 3D world in a puzzle sort of platformer. The reason that I wanted to look at this game is definitely not for the graphics or storyline but the actual gameplay of sorts.

I really like the idea that it is a chicken that is behind the story and that everything that they do in the game centres around the involvement of this particular one and others around it, especially in the cut scenes. The character Mort isn't particularly unique but he does have quite an interesting quality to him. He's quite a strange looking chap as he goes on his quest and so are the rest of the characters. There isn't a lot of difference between each one, but the style of them is quite interesting to look at. The designs are very simple, as the game was produced for the original PlayStation, but work well with the rest of the environment. The characters are also humourous and the way that they move and the way that they interact with objects in the environment.

The environment is very simple and similar to the characters, but strange in the way that the whole game is set in a parallel universe and would not be a normal kind of place where a chicken would be. There are a lot of random bricks that have been textured to look like children's building blocks and there are also random block type enemies that roll around the level that appear to die quickly. Its a strange concept to get your head around but it is a fun environment to explore but probably one that we would not look at as it just seems random and doesn't relate.

Lastly I wanted to look at the cut scenes and this is were I think this game does it very well. The cut scenes are plentiful, which doesn't always work, but here it does. After each level you get a cut scene whether its three chickens doing what appears to be yoga or the comedy news report from Chicken Little and Henny Penny and they really do work because of the level of humour that they produce. They make up for the poor lack of gameplay and give you something to look forward to as they are genuinely funny and this is what a cut scene should be; something you want to watch. This is something that can definitely be used as inspiration as our cut scene would want to be watched and would also be humourous, hopefully taking a page out of this book.