Pressure Cooker (Atari 2600)

Cooking can be a delicate process in real life, the quality of a dish easily impacted by how long something is heated or the amount of an ingredient used, and a modern cooking game can accurately include this need for precision. Back when the genre was starting out though, a system like the Atari 2600 didn’t really have the room to accurately capture the craft. However, Activision’s Pressure Cooker might be one of the first games that adapted food prep without getting too fanciful in the way games like BurgerTime did where you walk over giant hamburger buns to build them. Pressure Cooker still focuses on action over precision, but it’s one of the earliest experiences where you can serve up meals that must be prepared properly.

 

Appropriately designed by a man named Garry Kitchen, Pressure Cooker has a burger chef named Short-Order Sam working at The Grille on a busy day. Unfortunately, the automated machines meant to help with the food preparation are currently on the fritz, launching ingredients across the kitchen and complicating the burger building process. Cooked patties are automatically coming down a conveyor belt, so Sam has to catch the ingredients from the air to build the 12 orders being placed per level all while managing his Performance Rating. Starting at 50, Performance Points will drop any time an error is made, with wasting a flying ingredient or adding an extra helping of it to a burger subtracting 1, dropping a burger robbing you of 5, and letting a grilled patty fall of the conveyor belt extracting a heavy toll of 10 points. If your Performance Points reach 0, your run of Pressure Cooker comes to an end, but every 10,000 points in your traditional score you will get 10 points added back to your Performance Rating so a skillful player can make it pretty far so long as they manage the food right.

Displayed at the bottom of the screen are three color-coded orders you can tackle in whichever order you wish, a new one swapping in after one has been completed until you’ve either finished all 12 or run out of burger patties to use for them. Check marks in the order inform the player which ingredients are required and the color tells the player where they’ll need to deliver it, play split between two screens. On the first screen, Short-Order Sam stands in the middle of the chaotic kitchen, the pudgy cook scrambling about to catch ingredients that fly out one at a time from the right side of the screen. Onions, lettuce, cheese, and tomatoes will fly out with little regard for what you need, and here’s where the most important part of Pressure Cooker’s play comes in. If you want the ingredient, you need to position Sam so he’s facing it and can snag it as soon as he touches it. Afterwards, you can deliver it safely to the conveyor belt, the next ingredient only appearing after the one you’re holding is placed. However, if you snag an ingredient by mistake, you cannot just dump it. It must be placed on a burger to be disposed of, potentially polluting your order and making it undeliverable. To repel ingredients you don’t currently need, you only need to hold the controller button, your big belly deflecting it back into the machine so the next item can immediately be spewed out. Once you’ve built one of the burgers that was ordered, you can usually count on a bun being fired from the bottom to complete it, Sam then needing to head to the bottom of the screen and place it in one of the three color-coded chutes in the wrapping room.

With the time pressure of the automatically arriving burger patties, the ingredients flying out with little regard for what you need, and the need to grab what you require to build the burgers before the chance has passed, Pressure Cooker creates an enjoyably hectic gameplay style where you’ll be running around balancing all the moving parts. You can attempt to build multiple burgers at once or focus on one at a time, but with so many things to keep track of you can be overwhelmed if you don’t balance things properly. The proper amount of pressure is placed on the player and there is a gradual increase in the speed you need to complete burgers to avoid losing them, Pressure Cooker never having a slow moment because the balancing act only ends when the level’s wrapped up and your score is being tallied. With orders requiring more pieces in the later levels of the repeating loop, Pressure Cooker keeps upping the difficulty before giving you a small breather in pulling back, the flow of managing the kitchen building to a fever pitch before you go from scrambling to keep up to easing back into simple burgers to regain your strength for the tough stuff.

 

The Performance Rating system is a pretty strong form of limiting the run, the player able to gradually build it up if they can keep up the good work but any mishap in the kitchen can lead to a penalty the player will feel. Reserving the biggest bit of docked points for the burger drops is fair and keeping ingredient mismanagement as something that only slightly impacts the score prevents frustration, but there is a little quirk that’s hard to overlook. Short-Order Sam’s body is entirely in charge of the ingredient grabbing and deflection, but his sprite has a large head and chef’s hat on top. When lining yourself up for an incoming piece of food, it’s easy to ever so slightly misalign yourself so that the food splatters against your face instead, docking the point even though you were in its path. I have to imagine this emerges from technical limitations, the leniency to let you catch an item that brushes against your chin not working on a system that would probably require his chef hat to be able to catch it as well to include that region of his body, but Sam’s belly is still big enough that you can get the hang of lining up properly despite the occasional error. A similar problem can happen in the wrapping room, the chute openings you need to drop burgers down visually wider than the space that actually accepts the burger. You do have time to position yourself properly before dropping it at least since there aren’t ingredients hurtling towards you constantly in the wrapping room, but like the food-to-head collisions, the occasional error is likely to crop up because of detection quirks. However, this doesn’t dampen the game despite its frantic pace, and considering how much thought you need to put into reacting to the incoming food items, you can usually put a little bit more into positioning yourself correctly before you grab that onion or deflect that cheese.

THE VERDICT: The difficulty switch for Pressure Cooker only impacts whether or not the music plays constantly or only between rounds, but the difficulty balance is so wonderfully executed without the need for alteration already that it doesn’t ever slip in rote repetition. Pressure Cooker hits that wonderful Atari sweet spot where a game can be enjoyable every play, the changes to what’s being ordered keeping you on your toes even if you’ve become familiar with the game as a whole. The need to move about intelligently and react in time make it challenging to get a high score without being disheartening, and while you’ll need a bit to get used to its systems and quirks, this frantic bit of food prep has all its moving parts come together to be one the best experiences available on the Atari 2600.

 

And so, I give Pressure Cooker for Atari 2600…

A GREAT rating. What I thought would just be another good Activision Atari game that was still too simple due to the limitations of when it was made ended up being my current favorite game for the system. Even after playing it for review its gameplay called me back to play it more just for fun, the ease with which you can slip in and already be experiencing quick action that requires careful play making it a game that stays fresh and encourages that idea you can do better on your next go. The Performance Rating system is incredibly well conceived, serving almost as health that punishes the small errors with only minor slaps on the wrist but makes sure to deduct strongly for the mistakes that go against filling out the orders properly. Pressure Cooker could be better with a mild remake where catching detection and chute dropping was a little bit more lenient, but it’s something that can be so easily accommodated that it doesn’t hurt the fast paced food prep enough to truly hurt the experience. You’ll lose not because that piece of lettuce disintegrated when it touched your nose, you lose when the balance of speed and managing orders goes awry, and since the game provides the ingredients quickly enough so long as you’re diligent in proper deflection and delivery, it never feels like you’ve unfairly found your run at an end.

 

While catching flying ingredients to smack on conveyor belt burgers isn’t even close to accurate food prep, Pressure Cooker’s approach to gamifying cooking works wonderfully. It’s definitely more action game than cooking game, but the need to place ingredients properly is worked into the order system, the time pressure is simulated by way of the cooked patties being on the conveyor belt, and the need to make things exactly as ordered leads to the point deductions when you do mix up ingredients. While accuracy can make a modern cooking game as satisfying as creating a real dish, Pressure Cooker focuses on providing a more traditional enjoyable video game that happens to contain cooking as the means of play. The old school simplicity with the complexity of food prep is what made Pressure Cooker a fast favorite of mine and certainly one of the highlights of an old system’s library.