Assemble Burgers. Go to War. Pretend Everything is Fine.

NES Catalog #041-42

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BurgerTime

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PUBLISHER: Data East

DEVELOPER: Data East (port by SAS Sakata)

RELEASE DATE: Nov. 27th, 1985 (JP), May 1987 (US)

ALSO AVAILABLE ON: Arcade, Atari 2600, Apple II, Mattel Aquarius, Commodore 64, Colecovision, Famicom Disk System, Intellivision, Mobile, MSX, Switch (via Arcade Archives or G-Mode Archives), PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 4 (via Arcade Archives), TI-99/4A, Sharp X1, Wii Virtual Console

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There are six stages in BurgerTime, but you’ll be lucky to get past the first two. Between the burger assembling, the sentient food, and the chef’s poor running abilities, BurgerTime might be the hardest arcade port ever made.

You control Peter Pepper, a chef yearning to move beyond burgers, but unable to break into the high-end restaurant scene. One evening, a nightmare grabs ahold of him and takes him to hell: neverending burgers, bigger than himself, and anthropomorphic pickles, hot dogs, and egg yolks out to kill him for no reason at all.

To survive, Peter must run over the ingredients – lettuce, meat, buns – and assemble them at the bottom of the screen into a competent looking burger. The ingredients are spread out over many levels connected by ladders. When you run over each ingredient, they only fall one level - unless an evil foodstuff happens to be on them, then they’ll fall two levels. Otherwise, you’ll have to tediously run over each ingredient multiple times to assemble the burgers in each stage.

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So much work for so little reward.

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