Super BurgerTime (Arcade)
While BurgerTime now sits quite comfortably among the other fondly remembered arcade classics of the 1980s, that doesn’t mean that a sequel was a guaranteed success back in its day. It didn’t help that they would wait around 8 years to make a true sequel to the burger-building platform game, and that lack of confidence in the product is likely why few Super BurgerTime cabinets were even produced. However, as we get further from a past where you had to find a new game in a local business to play it, we reach the age where plenty of retro games are made easily available across various platforms. If you want to play Super BurgerTime now, you can buy it on consoles like Switch, download it on Steam, or even have it included as part of the Retro-Bit Super Retro-Cade’s library of games. While a BurgerTime fan might have had to wait a long time for this level of availability, at least now most of the world will never have to search far to see the sequel to a famous arcade staple.
Super BurgerTime gets off to a quick start, showing the map screen for your adventure for a second before you’re thrown into the first level without much context. Up to two players can take up the roles of a pair of brothers named Peter Pepper Jr. and Pete Pepper Jr. who head off to stop a food-themed prince from overrunning the kingdom with living food creatures. While some of the prince’s minions are giants who must be attacked directly, to clear most stages you’ll need to actually focus on finishing the creation of a set of enormous burgers. The top bun and all the ingredients within have been spread across platforms, the Pepper brothers needing to leap up onto them and pound them down so they’ll fall down a floor and start building burgers. One ingredient hitting another will form a chain reaction and knock the other ingredients down a floor, but they can only be moved one layer a time. You can stomp on them if you’re worried jumping might send you up a floor at least, but like many features in the game you’ll probably learn this by experimenting rather than being told about it.
The burger-building job is complicated by the various food monsters running around the platforms, the player needing to not only navigate the tall levels to build the burgers but also avoid an untimely end. You do get to have three lives per quarter, but as the game goes on it definitely becomes harder and harder to stick around as the enemies are piled into the stages. A lot of the danger they present is simply denying space, the large walking food items patrolling platforms so you’ll have to jump over them, climb ladders to get around them, or simply work on something else until the way ahead is clearer. While you don’t have to worry about much from eggs and hot dogs, the enemy line-up becomes a regular buffet as soon large leeks cover multiple platforms with their height, bamboo shoots dig in before launching up as rocket-propelled bamboo stalks that act like walls, and carrots will start to fly around the level. Some pesky fruits might pursue you at incredible speed if they spot you and pea pods will shoot little rolling peas across the platform, but the real danger comes from the foes who aren’t food themed. A hammer will smash the ground and make your little cook hop inadvertently, potentially into danger or away from his goal. Vultures fly by, already dominating a lot of space on their own, but the rocks they drop can quickly cover vertical space as well.
If Super BurgerTime could control itself on how many enemies it wants to pile into a stage, the enemy repertoire would actually be fairly good and varied. There is some design overlap to be sure, a lot of them just wander about, but the amount of unique enemies could have lead to a gradual increase in difficulty and make the player consider how they tackle the increasingly large levels that require screen scrolling to show in their entirety. However, not only do the enemies feel crowded in the later stages, but they will revive shortly after being dealt with, meaning that even trying to fight your way to the burger ingredients won’t put a dent in the oppressive number of enemies. The game does take some time to ramp up to the moments where it really feels built to snag life after life at least, plenty of levels landing in a decent spot of having tough foe groupings but manageable ones.
When you do start a new life or a level in Super BurgerTime, you are given a little pepper shaker to defend yourself with. This can, with enough strikes, leave a foe vulnerable to a quick kick that will kill them, and having breaks from foes like the hammer can be worth the time investment. However, the shaker’s availability is timed, meaning soon you’ll be running around without a weapon to fight back against the food army. Luckily, dropping ingredients from the giant burgers you’re building can squash food monsters with ease, and even if you can’t trick them to end up under the burger parts, the sides of the level hold some helpful items. If you can reach the two castle towers on either side of the screen, items will periodically dangle back and forth, these providing extra bonuses or even new weapons. Grab yourself a skewer and you can carve through foes as if it was a katana, grab a pair of shoes and you’ll have higher jumps for a while, and a cape will make it so you can take one extra hit over the usual result of instant death on contact. Water sprayers give you a long range attack and a frying pan hits hard if something is in close range, so having a few extra tools to help out can mean a more careful player can find ways to turn the tides in all but the most crowded of stages.
While the stages in Super BurgerTime are often bright and colorful and the enemies goofy walking food items with beady eyes, the loud carnival music can be almost maddening at times thanks to its poor pairing with obnoxious sound effects. Cuckoo clock sounds are unusually common, the game believes you should hear the static-like sound of bamboo rockets even when they’re not on screen, and there’s indecipherable little high-pitched chatter at times amidst the din. The game can sometimes feel more frantic than it is because of the noise overload, and those stages that do crank the enemy count too high aren’t helped by the cacophony they can help create.
Boss battles do take a different form than the burger-building action. In these stages you are given an infinite amount of small burgers to hurl at the boss, this ammunition perhaps being what you were building across the previous stages despite the obvious size discrepancy now that they can fit in your hands. The bosses begin with an interesting theme, a beehive, bird’s nest, and grouper fish all spitting out smaller creatures to attack you to try and prevent you from hitting the source of the foes. When you start fighting the balloons with Mickey Mouse ears in World 4 though, the idea of it bosses being something that produces smaller targets is thrown out despite still using the same formula of small enemies protecting one big baddie. The approach to boss design is similar across most of the fights but still a quick an enjoyable break from burger-building platforming, the player able to plan their movements and attacks much more than in a regular stage. Like most things in the game it’s mildly amusing rather than a riveting time, these fights simple but effective enough and certainly quieter than a regular level. However, the burger-building is still the more engaging challenge as it demands more mobility and responsiveness from the player despite its easily identified issues.
THE VERDICT: While the music and sound can sometimes come together to be quite the racket, Super BurgerTime’s burger-building platforming is still an interesting challenge that nearly has the right ingredients for a good time. Later levels do go overboard with the amount of enemies they toss in, but the enemy types do bring a lot of new considerations to how you play and which power-ups you want to grab when they’re more reasonably spread throughout a level. Boss stages are a simple but welcome break from the norm, and while the regular game can get a bit chaotic, there is enough substance to the player’s activities and the dangers that they face that this can make for some quick arcade fun.
And so, I give Super BurgerTime for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. While the final levels really want to squeeze out quarters from players who are likely already committed to beating the game, the bulk of the short experience does do a better job at focusing on challenges where you can have the reaction time needed to get around the many unique enemy types and build your burgers. The timed pepper shakers can sting a bit to lose but force you to engage with the many special power-ups that can prove to be more enjoyable to use, and while the boss fights feel a little basic, they do keep up the game’s focus on testing your ability to navigate a space safely and complete your tasks. Co-op definitely gives the game more life, partially because it means a death will lead to you spawning near them rather than back at the bottom layer of a stage, but the levels, even when large, do come in enough different arrangements and with a variety of combined threats to make them distinct enough to be entertaining. They do blend together some still, mainly because the game doesn’t want to leave an enemy idea behind and hits that late game pile-up for it, but if you can bear the peppy but persistent background music and the commotion of various sound effects accompanying it, Super BurgerTime is still a fine time.
While time might have been the biggest reason Super BurgerTime was rolled out in a limited capacity in 1990, there were certainly some other factors in play that might have made it seem like a risky bet. The noise issues likely wouldn’t be as bad in a busy arcade and having a few unfair moments is practically how arcade games were designed at the time, but the adventure of the Pepper brothers doesn’t have the right amount of spice to it. It has a good set of ingredients that it can mix together well at times, but the old-fashioned platforming would struggle to stand out as games got more advanced both visually and in the kind of action they could throw together. Super BurgerTime would feel a little humble next to games like Final Fight and Super Mario Bros. 3 would rock the home market, but now that it isn’t trying to compete with the latest games, it’s easier to not only go back and play a quick and simple arcade game like Super BurgerTime, but it’s easier to find it to do so too.