When home consoles began getting ports of games that people flocked to in the arcades, Burgertime was one of the hot commodities to get. Coleco managed to snag the license for it and used it to help boost the popularity of their Colecovision console along with other arcade favorites like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mr. Do!, Spy Hunter, Tapper, etc. The beauty of the Colecovision in comparison to its main competition, the Atari 2600, was that it was able to bring near arcade-perfect titles to your living room. Burgertime was no exception to the rule.
In Burgertime, you’re a chef that’s armed with pepper. Your goal is to create giant burgers while avoiding other food products like eggs and sausages that try to prevent you from accomplishing your goal. For some reason of another, pepper stops the evil food in their tracks for a few seconds, allowing you to get away when you’re in trouble...But your pepper supply is limited, so it’s best to only use it in important situations. To rack up extra points, you can lure the evil food either onto a falling burger ingredient or try and squash them between a falling burger and another ingredient below. This all equates to good ol’ fashioned fun, by the way.
The controls are nice and responsive in Burgertime. That’s a good thing, too ‘cause sometimes you’ll get yourself in a pickle and those nice controls can really come in handy. It’s easy to toss the pepper in the air to blind the rotten eggs and sausages stalking you, which another nice thing...Especially if you attempt the harder difficulty levels. The control is just as nice and tight as you’d find in the arcade...Which is a great thing to have when porting it over to a home system.
Graphically, Burgertime holds its own in comparison to other Colecovision games. It’s honestly nothing spectacular or breathtaking to look at, but the graphics aren’t bad looking, either. In the audio department, Burgertime has some nice background music to accompany the bleep-and-bloop sound effects. The only downside to the background music is that it’s actually only a single song that lasts a few seconds that is looped repeatedly. While the graphics and audio won’t wow anyone, they definitely get the job done and it’s clear that the developers didn’t slack off with either one.
Overall, this is a great port of an arcade classic. For its time, it was the absolute best port of Burgertime yet seen on a console. It’s great, near-arcade-perfect ports like this gem that helped make the Colecovision such a popular game console before the great video game crash pretty much wiped everything out. After playing Burgertime, amongst the other fantastic arcade ports that Coleco published, you’ll easily understand why Colecovision was a major threat to Atari’s stranglehold on the video game world...And after making a few burgers, you may find that you have a hunger to play this game some more. - Ape
1984
