Pressure Cooker

"Feed me!"

Order up! The Grille is swamped with customers, but luckily a cook known as Short-Order Sam is scrambling to prepare the food. Unfortunately, he's the only one working in the kitchen, and the burden of so many orders is turning out to be too much to bear. The customers are hungry, hungry enough to storm the kitchen at any moment and devour poor Sam. Your job is to help Sam prepare and distribute each hamburger to the wrapping chute before things become hostile and before one more person utters the badly cliched phrase ''Did you have to kill the cow?'' After all, a man with the initials ''S.O.S'' is just asking for trouble.

Yes, Pressure Cooker is a game that has you assume the role of a chef and create your dining masterpieces in the forms of fast food. Unlike BurgerTime, whose basis is more of the same, there are no angry ingredients to encounter nor half the creativity. Like any game, there are flaws lurking around every corner. In this game's case, they're very serious flaws. Still, senseless games a lot of times have their good points, as does this one... err... sort of.

Gameplay: 6/10

Like most Atari 2600 titles, you have several difficulty levels to choose from at the beginning. The only difference in difficulty between each setting in the time allowed to complete the orders, which is naturally shorter on higher difficulties.

Once you start the game, you'll immediately have to ''catch'' ingredients and place them on hamburgers as they make their ways off the conveyer belt. This room, known as the ''Assembly Room'' is where the main action takes place (and what food-oriented action it is). Now, you don't just make burgers all willy-nilly, you must first look at what orders you need to fill by consulting the order board at the bottom of the screen. Each individual order is portrayed by a color-coded check mark under a picture of the corresponding ingredient or condiment. To make a burger, you simply drop the right combination of lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, onions, etc. onto the bun. Once you have prepared the appropriate burger and have placed the top bun (which will only appear after the correct toppings are on the meat), it's just a hop, skip and jump away to the Wrapping Room... minus the hopping, skipping or jumping. Here you'll have to bid a teary farewell to your finished product and send it on its way down the correct chute, indicated by the color matching that of the order. Then it's back to the Assembly Room. Lather, rinse, repeat.

During the game, you'll notice a large number at the top of the screen representing your performance rating. You start out the game with 50, losing or adding points based on what you do. As an example: if you waste a condiment or ingredient by allowing it to smash into something (the ingredients will fly at you from the right side of the screen), you'll lose one point. Doing things like placing the finished burger in the correct wrapping chute will earn you a tremendous amount of overall points (displayed at the very top of the screen) as will successfully catching ingredients. To progress, you must accurately prepare and wrap all orders for the given ''round.'' A game-over occurs when your performance rating falls all the way to zero.

Moving Sam is as simple as can be; catching ingredients and condiments is another story. To prevent the flying food from colliding into you, you must stand perfectly in front of the incoming edibles. Many times, the wrong foodstuffs will depart at a high velocity towards you regardless of whether or not they'll be of any use to you at the time. This can cause a world of problems as well as make you lose performance points if a burger falls off the conveyer belt as you're waiting. In the Wrapping Room, unless Sam is facing the screen when dropping the burger, it will somehow miss the chute and points will be deducted. Yes, this game can be frustrating at first, and the perfectionist attitude the game has is partially to thank for that.

You may be thinking, from the sound of things, that Pressure Cooker seems very repetitive. In a sense, you would be right. The game is largely uninspired and, for lack of a better word, somewhat boring. However, the most fun probably comes from the two-player mode, where you take turns with another player filling orders. Not that it breaks the routine of things, but it does offer a welcome alternative to the main game.

Graphics: 8/10

The early 80's sparked a lot of innovation in the graphical appeal of games. Though Pressure Cooker doesn't appear as anything to jump up and dance about, it does seem apparent that a lot of time was spent on making things look nice.

Sam accurately resembles a stereotypical chubby chef with a giant white hat, only missing the notorious ''Kiss the Cook'' apron. His movements are obviously limited, but the animations associated with them are as good as they could have possibly been. The ingredients (shooting out at you with a presumed intent to maim) for the most part look like food. The cheese, on the other hand, looks remarkably like a large, yellow square. When these are topped on the burger, they sort of ''melt'' into the meat as if they were goo. When each morsel of food runs headfirst into an object, it shatters into dots. Yes, I was unaware that lettuce would explode like that if hit hard enough.

There are two different screens you'll travel to in your quest of fast-foodsmanship: the Assembly and Wrapping Rooms. The Assembly Room contains most of the animations compared to the Wrapping Room (located a screen below) which is pretty mediocre overall. Both are mainly background color (blue) with objects in the foreground, like the conveyer belts or wrapping chutes. Where Sam stands and walks around is a bit darker than the background itself, and since there's no floor to be seen I suppose that's to let you know it's out of limits.

Colors are not over used nor are they too bright, and everything is clearly defined in a goofy sort of way. I wouldn't say things are a pleasure to look at, but I've seen far worse.

Sound: 5/10

Based on the game mode selected, you'll either hear music only between rounds or during the entire game. Personally, I would have opted for no music during the game period. The reason isn't that it's bad, but that it's the same six or seven notes repeated over and over and over... *ahem* Thankfully the in-game music is set at a low volume, but ''mute'' never hurts. The only worthwhile music is played at the very beginning and between rounds (when all orders are filled, before moving on). It's a bit drawn out in length, and since you're frozen in place during this musical number it isn't unusual to wonder just when it will end so you can tend to the burgers that are moving down the conveyer belt at the same time. Nevertheless, it's a decent attempt to liven things up.

Sound effects are thrown in where they're needed, but nothing particularly stands out compared to other games on the console. The most prominent ones are the ''beep! beep! beep!'' when your score goes up after dropping off a completed burger and the ''splat'' noise made when an ingredient hits Sam or another surface. The latter sound effect is also reused continuously for every time you place a piece of food on a burger.

Clearly you won't be hearing anything strikingly fantastic here, and the fact that it sounds better than REAL restaurant kitchens doesn't quite cut it.

Replay: 3/10

The game is not very addictive in the least, contrary to what the plot makes it out to be. Similar titles have been able to pull off a type of game where playing for hours is the norm and it still continues to shine, but not this one. Sure, the two-player mode is worth a little extra time, but afterwards things just become more and more tedious. I suppose it's best to be played in small doses rather than for a single long period of time, which will most likely be more than anyone can stand.

Overall: 5/10

Pressure Cooker is by no means a BAD game, but it does wear out its welcome fairly quickly. In a world where gorillas were throwing barrels and yellow dots were munching ghosts, this game barely stood a chance. If you can admire the good points rather than the bad then this might be something worthy of your interest. If you're looking for a game that provides minimal entertainment to kill a few minutes with, then there's none better. Otherwise, I doubt many would have fun with it. Pressure Cooker probably doesn't deserve much more recognition than it's received and definitely isn't a title I would strongly recommend, but for those who are curious enough to play it might actually enjoy this more or less unknown game.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/09/03