A shocker, me talking about another Data East game. The studio that is responsible for many of my early arcade memories and NES home ports, their stuff always ended up on my shelf, and in this review section. BurgerTime, like Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga, ended up being quite the token muncher whenever I had a chance to hit up an arcade. 

Developed for Japanese arcades under the name Hamburger by Akio Nakamura (Lock 'n' Chase, Super Cobra) in 1982, BurgerTime saw home ports on plenty of platforms. So many home computers at the time, it saw versions on platforms such as the Colecovision, Apple II, TI99/4A, the Atari 7800, and the NES. From my experience, I think the Nintendo conversion is the best overall.

I talked about great time-waster games with Atari-era and arcade games like Kaboom!, BurgerTime is another one of those that you could end up investing a great deal of time playing, just to see how far you can get, how high a score you can tally, or how fast you can do it. The premise of the game is easy to grasp; each level is a differently structured maze with your burger ingredients, and the Chef Peter Pepper must traverse across these massive patties and buns until you complete your orders at the bottom of the map. Meanwhile, the other condiments and meats have run amok in the kitchen and WANT YOU DEAD. Your means of self defense is pepper, which stuns the sausages, eggs, and pickles that are after you.

Extra peppers can be earned by flattening the enemy ingredients with YOUR ingredients. This prompts an item to appear when enough are defeated, giving you another pepper shaker. The way the game plays puts me in mind of Dig Dug, but with more aggressive obstacles. The patterns can be rather jarring, since they will never walk past a series of stairs. It takes some practice to corral them where you'd like them to go, and since they immediately respawn upon defeat, I find myself starting over to get the group in some semblance of order.

The graphics are pretty charming, while there isn't a lot to look at, the wild animations provided to the pickles, sausages, and eggs can be eye-catching, I have always gotten a kick out the way they wobble chasing you down the stairs. BurgerTime's music, as short as the loop is, is pretty effective at capturing the game's frantic chaos. This theme gets stuck in my brain, it's such effective noodling that makes me appreciate this era of arcade gaming.

BurgerTime doesn't have an "ending" per say, and I can only last so long before finding out if the stages loop when enough progress has been met. The challenge provided in this arcade classic keeps me coming back to it over the years, and it holds up well. If you can find the NES version (or just emulate it), it's the one I strongly recommend.