The Flintstones: BurgerTime in Bedrock is a crossover between Data East‘s classic arcade game, BurgerTime, and the famous cartoon show, The Flintstones. It was developed by Conspiracy Entertainment and published by Classified Games for the Game Boy Color in 2000. It’s basically BurgerTime with Flintstones graphics, but it isn’t even a particularly good version of BurgerTime.

You control Fred Flintstone (or Barney Rubble – you can choose between them in the options) and must walk across burger buns and patties to assemble them on plates at the bottom of the screen. Instead of the pepper spray of the original BurgerTime, you have limited club-bashes to stun enemies that are in your way. When you run out of hits you can no longer stun enemies – unless you collect more hits which occasionally spawn on a level.

To be honest – after just a short time playing this – I was generally unimpressed with it. For starters, when you lose a single life it immediately asks you if you want to continue, as though you’ve lost all your lives and it’s game over. Which just seems wrong to me. From what I can tell, the game gives you three lives to begin with, so why does it ask you if you want to continue if you lose just one of them? It’s bizarre, and an indicator that the developers didn’t really know what they were doing. I also think that the music in this is very poor (it’s too high tempo for this kind of game and is also generic and mostly tuneless), especially compared to the excellent soundtrack in 1991’s BurgerTime Deluxe on the Game Boy.

On the plus side: some of the animated characters are alright; the cut scenes are okay, and the versus mode option is a welcome addition (but needs a link cable), but overall this is a fairly uninspired BurgerTime variant. Some of the levels are ridiculously simple (where you walk along one path, towards a dead end, and how fast you move determines whether you can complete the level or not). On one occasion I was touched by an enemy at the exact same moment I dropped the final layer onto the last burger, and the game gave me the benefit of the doubt and changed the dying animation to the screen completion animation mid way through. Which was nice of it, but it also left me a bit confused.

Overall, The Flintstones: BurgerTime in Bedrock is game that is generally lacking and could have been better. If you’re both a BurgerTime fan, and a Flintstones fan, then you might get some enjoyment out of it, otherwise most players will probably find it unsatisfying. Play BurgerTime Deluxe on the original Game Boy instead. It’s much better than this.

More: The Flintstones: BurgerTime in Bedrock on Moby Games