Barmy Burgers

The Good
BurgerTime was released by Data East in the early Eighties, and the game had player has to make burgers by running over ingredients while avoiding eggs and sausages that came alive. This arcade hit made its way to 8-bit systems later, but the ZX Spectrum received not one taste of the burger. Blaby Computer Games decided to change all that, making an unofficial version of the game.

After the loading and title screens, there is no options screen where you can select joystick or keyboard controls; it's right to the chase. So, the only way to find out the controls is if you look at the printed instructions that comes with the game. The gameplay is very faithful to the original BurgerTime. Running over one of the ingredients cause it to collapse as I expected, and the animation of each ingredient as it falls down to the next level is well done. The status bar at the bottom looks very good.

There are ladders that you need to negotiate to get to certain ingredients. There are no bonus items that appear near the top level, that give you an extra amount of pepper, but while I previously played BurgerTime, I tend to ignore these bonuses. In this game, you start with five peppers which you use on your enemies to send them back to their starting positions. Upon the loss of each lives, the amount of peppers is restored back to five.

Speaking of lives, you start the game with three lives, and that's all you have during the game. When you lose your last life, a new game starts with no title screen. This is pretty good because you don't have to select any options or press a key to start. The game is easy to play with a joystick, in which you navigate Barmy by moving the joystick left or right and climb ladders by moving it up and down.

The Bad
The controls are cumbersome, making the game difficult to play. You have use the number keys along the top row of the keyboard (5,6,7,8 to move, 0 to use peppers). As I said, you can also play with the joystick, but you still have to press 0. Why the developer didn't just think of the fire button on the Kempston I don't know.

Although the enemies are pretty good at chasing the player, they sometimes appear stuck while they are climbing up and down ladders. Finally, the sound effects really doesn't suit the theme of the game. They are more sci-fi-ish (Example: when the ingredients drop down a level, the shooting of a laser gun can be heard).

The Bottom Line
For a BurgerTime clone, Barmy Burgers is a decent game. Although the gameplay matches that of the original arcade game, it gets let down by cumbersome controls, sound effects that are out of place, and slightly clumsy AI. Other than that, this is one game to get your hands on if you want to know what BurgerTime would look like on a ZX Spectrum.