BurgerTime Review

BurgerTime is widely acknowledged as one of the classics of the early days of video games. Indeed, most consoles of any merit up until the time of the NES had an incarnation of it. This includes M Network’s version of the game for the Atari 2600, the version which this review is going to be looking at. Is the Atari 2600 version of BurgerTime worthwhile? Read on to find out.

The concept behind BurgerTime is simple. You are a chef attempting to make burgers. In order to do this, you have to walk across every piece of each burger enough times to make it fall to the bottom of the screen one level at a time. Hitting a higher piece will cause it to knock lower pieces down also in a chain reaction. Attempting to stop you are hotdogs, breadsticks, and other baddies. You can dodge them or spray them with pepper spray if you have any left. You can also squish them or drop them with pieces of the burgers. BurgerTime is good, simple fun, as were most games of its era.

Aesthetically, the Atari 2600 version of BurgerTime is weak compared to other versions of the game, but, for a 1982 Atari 2600 game, it isn’t bad. The sound effects are decent, but are pretty typical fare for the Atari 2600 in that era. The graphics are simple and contain basically straight lines of various sized pixels for platforms, ladders, and burger pieces, all of a sort of yellowish color across a black background, although the burger pieces will switch to more appropriate colors when they reach the bottom of the screen. The baddies come in various colors and shapes, and are animated okay, but not in any exceptional way. Some of the enemy “designs” do leave a lot to be desired for a game released in 1982 though.

So, outside the basic concept, what does BurgerTime have to offer? There are five different levels for you to navigate your way through, which will reloop should you manage to finish all of them. The game can be played one player or two player, with that choice being made using the right difficulty switch. Probably the best feature of this game for its time was the fact that the left difficulty switch could be used to pause the game, something seen in very few Atari 2600 games.

I must be honest though. Even though this game is a classic, the Atari 2600 version in particular hasn’t aged well, and I, for the most part, don’t understand what the big deal about this game ever was anyway. It’s reasonably entertaining, certainly, but it’s no Donkey Kong or Space Invaders in my opinion. Those of you who are fans of the game would do better to get a version of this game on a more powerful system, but this version has all of the core elements necessary to make the game fun.