"The best Burger Time...is on a computer named after a food!"

Burgertime always drew a crowd in the arcade, with your cute little chef Peter Pepper being ruthlessly by legged hot dogs, fried eggs, and pickles later on. He must roam across several ladder-linked platforms with burger ingredients on top of them to repel the monsters, whose touch is death(ah, the burgers must have GOOD cholesterol while the other foods have the BAD stuff,) with the ingredients falling to the next lowest one and potentially causing a chain reaction. The drop is even longer if the food on legs is on board, and he can squash bad guys beneath him although they do regenerate later. There's even pepper which will stun monsters for a bit, and alternative high-calorie foods which appear after you've run over a specified number of bun parts transmogrify into an additional shake when Peter gets them. The tunes are catchy, as are the bouncy burger parts and general feeling of mayhem, but the game was shockingly hard and unresponsive to controls. Nevertheless for its ideas Burgertime was awarded ports to many platforms. The Apple is the best; it's got a cycle of twelve levels to the arcade and NES's six, along with many special tricks you can try that are not present in the arcade. As the levels get higher you have fewer ladders at the edge of a platform(read: more dead ends) and fewer intersections and the monsters get faster than you(although they can be made to weave around,) forcing you to use the burger parts as defense(keep monsters away or paralyzed) as well as offense(scoring points.)

The Apple even has strong controls. You have the option of a joystick or keyboard, and although it may have been a special feature of the cracked version(some people unloaded a bunch of stuff on my family before moving back to Europe, really) there was even a startup screen explaining the keys' functions-IJKM with S to shake, and you can also lead Peter diagonally, although if you try to run too sharply in a U, (right/up/left,) Peter will just head back down the ladder. Still, there is never a need to lose a footrace because you don't change directions in time, but the best part of the game is how you can start out on up to level nine, and if you get farther than that, you can start on the level before where you die(woo, a nine course meal.) Good players can expect to bash through one later level per game, but it takes strategy to get through two with one allotment of chefs and peppers, and getting through level twelve is no casual task as you can be bumped back. You also have opportunities for other tricks not available on other versions; you can run at a monster and drop the bun to send the monster falling if your timing is superb. Monsters taking a ladder and winding up in the middle of a burger can also be dropped instead of squashed.

Although the burger cheese and egg yolks are of necessity a sickly orange, the graphics are clear enough to capture the ideas of the arcade version, and I've always thought the way everyone ran around was a nice twist on the cheesy children's cow-jumped-over-the-moon song. The running eatables are very funny, and it'll take a long time to get tired of watching the bad guys get squashed or ''peppered'' or take a tumble. Peter's death scene caught and falls on his backside, it's funny, and when he jumps up and down after solving a board it is hard not to smile at his seeming attempts to fly. One ambiguous graphic is the snack on the first board that gets you pepper. Is it popcorn or ice cream? Fortunately this game has enough karma that the player shouldn't mind pretending it's either. The Apple version also managed to preserve much of the arcade game's situational sounds, although the lilting background music had to be canned.

Burgertime doesn't seem like an intricate strategy game, but if you want to go far, you need to develop a perfect routine, or find a way to start with 200 peppers and chefs. Although it's easy to solve any one level with the starting five peppers and chefs, the later levels have some interesting wrinkles that force you to think and outflank your computer opponents. Alternatively, if you are unambitious, you can just take a few minutes and have more fun and less calories than one usually does with burgers, or try to get past level twelve. You can even plan ahead to later levels; it's riskier to solve certain levels slowly, but you can get more peppers, which in some cases are more valuable than lives(you'll have your share of games where you didn't use nearly all your pepper, along with other games where you wasted too many defending one life and wind up stuck.) If there is one fault with the game, it's that it can be unforgiving when you have one burger piece left to run over--with monsters assured of going faster than you, that may actually be harder than having half of them. That is a minor nuisance though, not unlike the fellow who blows on a straw to make a projectile out of its paper wrapping. With all the possibilities Burgertime has, it'll never feel like reheated leftovers. It's one of the rare instances where a game was improved by porting from the arcade. Just don't get too into the game and start eating at the keyboard.

Now, someone needs to come along and write a sequel. TacoTime, with tacos on the bottom to catch the ingredients? Or maybe SubwayTime, with different types of bread? Calling all graphical programming whizzes with a taste for retro...

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/00, Updated 03/06/02