BurgerTime (Arcade)

If you heard about a game where you make burgers, you’d probably imagine something pretty similar to the real life act, not a chef running away from ingredients while smashing down the bun with his boots so it could fall down and build the burger. That kind of unusual creativity in executing a concept was practically required in the year 1982, the silly action game BurgerTime managing to catch on well enough to rub shoulders with other arcade games in discussions of classic titles. Practically the crown jewel of developer Data East’s output, it didn’t quite leave a footprint as large as its other popular arcade contemporaries, but it’s not too hard to see why it did well back in its day.

BurgerTime stars a chef named Peter Pepper who must assemble some absolutely massive burgers, but to do so requires scaling ladders scattered around a level filled with small platforms. Peter can’t jump so it’s not quite a platformer in the modern sense, but getting around the level requires spotting the right ladders to take to get to the giant pieces of the burger. Peter must walk across the entire surface of a burger ingredient to dislodge it from the platform, sending it crashing down one layer and knocking down any ingredient beneath it to do the same, chaining such drops an effective tactic in getting things done quickly. Depending on the level, Peter will need to assemble anywhere from 2 to 6 burgers through this process, the burgers themselves also coming in different sizes that blend with the platform placement to make getting around to properly build the burgers a challenging task.

Merely getting to the burger pieces isn’t technically that difficult, although some of the later stage designs do start to throw in more dead ends, complex platform arrangements, and limited ladder availability so that you do need to pay careful attention to the layout if you want to succeed. The real complication to burger building comes in the form of three pesky sentient food items who can kill Peter Pepper with their touch alone. The most abundant enemy to contend with is Mr. Hot Dog, the walking wiener seemingly the least intelligent of Peter’s foes but still just as dangerous. The hot dogs will usually follow after Peter once he gets near enough, but they seem to give up more easily than other evil foods and will even sometimes take a less optimal route in running after you if they come across a ladder. Mr. Egg and Mr. Pickle on the other hand seem a bit more dangerous, the wandering egg yolk and walking pickle slice seeming to lock onto Peter with more purpose. Online sources seem to suggest that all three food items actually behave the same and perhaps seeing the hot dogs more often meant I drew assumptions from outlier situations, but generally all of the food tries to follow Peter and it’s on you to try and outmaneuver them at the same time you attempt to reach the burger pieces you still need to drop.

If you approach BurgerTime casually, your food foes will likely overwhelm you with ease. The levels are tall and your mobility is limited by a reliance on ladders and horizontal spaces, and with food tending to spawn in around the four corners of the map, they can box you in if you don’t pay much attention to their movements. The enjoyment in BurgerTime actually comes from trying to outsmart the food so you can craft your burgers without dying, the player set back to the first stage if they lose all their lives. There are six distinct level designs before the stages start looping for the purposes of racking up a high score so seeing all the unique content is doable once you start to learn how to properly manipulate the animate ingredients. Tricking them into bunching up, guiding them on a wild goose chase to some corner you don’t need to do any more work in, or simply keeping Peter at a distance so they don’t move with much purpose can help you succeed, although getting the foes to bunch up into one pursuing pack is actually the best option despite it being the most dangerous.

Peter isn’t without his ways to actually fight back against the evil food, the chef starting off with a pepper shaker he can use any time he needs space. With a quick sprinkle, the food hit by the spice will become stunned, Peter able to walk through them until they’ve collected themselves. If you are cornered, a quick spritz of pepper can give you an out, but soon that enemy will be right back on your tail. You only pack a limited supply of pepper too, and while you’ll get a small refill when entering a new stage or when you pick up the bonus items that spawn once enough of the burgers have been built, it’s still pretty important to hold onto your spices as long as you can. Luckily there are two ways to eliminate enemies, and while they’ll always respawn shortly after, it can give you a brief break from the persistent chases. When burger ingredients come crashing down to the layers below, any living food caught beneath those pieces will be crushed. However, if you want something that can benefit you even more you can knock down an ingredient while food is standing on top of it, the enemy falling down with it and giving that ingredient extra weight so the burger pieces can fall down multiple layers. This is why grouping up enemies is so important, since if you can set it up just so, a huge batch of them will fall down and not only be out of the picture for a short while, but they’ll even help build the burger better than if you had been going about it the normal way. Technically they will ride that ingredient down to the layer it stops at and then walk back into play, but that’s usually fairly out of the way from your current position and sometimes the food tray the burgers are built on are far away from platforms so they enemies will need time to climb back into action.

The strategy involved in this platform action game almost gives it a puzzle-like quality, especially in Stage 5 where the limited amount of ladders requires a lot more thoughtful movement to avoid being put in a pickle by Mr. Pickle and his friends. However, the ladders are both the key to this game’s movement and one of its less solid features. It’s not uncommon to find early video game ladders to be finicky, refusing to let you climb up or down them unless you stand in the exact spot the game deems correct. With BurgerTime so dependent on constant ladder-climbing and one of the best tactics for success being to let enemies run in a group behind you, the moments where you’re slightly off for scaling a ladder are lethal in a game where your lives are in very short supply. While I don’t want to act like I never lost to legitimate mistakes on my own part, I feel like more of my deaths came from trying to pop onto a ladder only to be a little off, that second wasted enough to lead to my untimely demise.

BurgerTime can still have its moments despite some shaky ladder climbing detection that is simply a product of the time, but there’s another little problem that arises. Enemies spawn in so quickly that navigating corners of the stage can lead to an instant death, and while you can say that avoiding that outcome is just part of managing the level, there is a point where your options will be limited if you just try to run around the whole time trying to micromanage every variable. If you’re going for a high score these are probably more of a nuisance, but if you’re just playing for fun or shooting for getting through the unique level layouts this issue won’t hurt as much as it could. The music is probably more of a deterrent for going for a really deep run though. Decent for backing some action but definitely repetitive, there’s a little high pitch whine underneath it that only gets worse between stages. Once you’ve built every burger in a stage a jaunty victory tune plays that concludes with a high pitched note that gets louder and louder until it cuts to the introduction music for the following level. However, between that intro song and the regular stage music there is another sharp whine that scales up in volume until the next track comes in. Perhaps easy enough to ignore in a bustling arcade and it’s possible the old hardware even filtered it out, but for modern play it’s still a minor annoyance that can put a player on edge between levels that require a good bit of attention and proper execution to overcome.

THE VERDICT: The burger building antics of Peter Pepper make BurgerTime a difficult but enticing game. Managing the enemy movements is key to having the space to build your burgers, the six distinct level layouts requiring different approaches to reliably complete. The enemies can be a bit too relentless at times though, this mostly becoming a problem when they respawn so quickly or you miss a ladder because you were just slightly off. Taking foes out with burger pieces can lead to a drip feed of satisfying moments, but the overall experience isn’t quite smooth enough to let the room for strategic play fully shine.

And so, I give BurgerTime for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. BurgerTime is relentless but not brutal, that need to always keep moving to avoid the evil food key to success and thus making some on the fly decisions isn’t always going to pan out in the end. The difficulty is definitely one thing that makes it appealing to actually finish a stage, but it’s hard to really learn and plan when you get kicked back to the beginning so easily and little quibbles with ladders or quickly respawning enemies can make getting to where you left off last time less likely. It’s hard to say how BurgerTime could have handled the ladder problem better since it’s issues are born purely of the time it was made in, and while that doesn’t excuse it away, it does mean you can’t propose things like making the ladders wider without fundamentally changing a lot of the stage design in the process. A few more options to offset being done in by a ladder slip-up would probably be the key to improving it, things like slower enemy respawns, a little more pepper, or even letting you continue from the current stage potential routes for dulling the edge of BurgerTime’s flaws but such changes would be a bit too much if they were all thrown in. The fear of being run down by an egg yolk with legs is what pushes the action forward in BurgerTime and sanding it down too much would kill the appeal, but some smoothness would allow it to overcome the rough patches that make it harder to commit to trying to go deep to see the level types or earn a high score.

BurgerTime can be overwhelming at times with how persistent the enemies are, but this silly twist on making burgers can provide a bit of fun in spite of it. The goofy enemies and odd concept soften the blow a bit even if the ladders and music can sometimes undo that work, but it’s definitely a game that requires more thought than you’d first think and seeing your efforts pay off is more satisfying than if you were just mindlessly outmaneuvering the food by chance. That does make it a hard game to dabble in briefly at the arcade, BurgerTime pulling very few punches even when it could have benefited from it, but it does still feel like Data East’s baby deserves some of its status as a classic. Plus, since some of the more renowned games it rubs shoulders with aged about the same or even worse, it even has a leg up over some of its contemporaries so long as you know what you’re in for. Underestimate the likes of Mr. Hot Dog and Mr. Pickle at your own peril.