Burger Man, Amiga

Released for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1991, Burger Man is a clone of the classic Data East arcade game, BurgerTime. It was created by Cloud Nine Developments and published by Byte Back, with Paul Johnson doing the coding and with graphics by Nick Meade and Carl Cropley.

The ‘cartoon’ title screen and farty intro tune give some indication of what to expect, and that is: a brightly-coloured piece of Euro garbage, and that is exactly what you get with Burger Man.

When the game starts you’re lowered down, inside a capsule, onto what looks like a construction site, and must then walk across the platforms, across sections of burgers, to drop them down onto plates below.

The first screen is very strangely-designed and is half empty, and only contains one burger. Which is a worrying sign. “Worrying” in that I have to question what the developers were thinking when they decided to open the game with it. Did they really know what they were doing when they made Burger Man? I highly doubt it. The Amiga is more than capable of hosting a stellar port of Data East‘s BurgerTime, maybe even improving on it with a few new ideas, but the people who made this game had other ideas… “Hey, let’s make a sub-standard BurgerTime clone, by not even looking at what made BurgerTime great in the first place!” is my piss-take interpretation of what they were thinking.

The worst aspects of this game are: the levels are poorly designed throughout; the slowdown; the music is some of the worst, most tuneless dross I’ve ever heard in a video game; the main character is poorly-animated, and his death animation sequence is bizarre (but in a bad way); the score animations are unnecessarily distracting; enemy AI is baffling (either they’re too direct and aggressive, or they’re incredibly stupid); the movement controls are weird – especially when getting on and off ladders; and there’s also a completely unnecessary timer on each level. At least the game doesn’t make you start a screen from the very beginning when you lose a life. So I guess we should be thankful for small mercies… That said: the more I played this game, the more I hated it. Badly-designed levels, and the ridiculous level of difficulty, are its most pressing problems.

I can’t believe that this game even had a “Producer”… What the hell was Nik Sen thinking when he helped ‘produce’ Burger Man? Was he thinking “well, it’s just a paycheck…“? Or was he thinking “this is sh*t – get me outta here!“? Or did he really think that they were doing good work? Everyone involved in Burger Man should hang their heads in shame, because the Amiga – and BurgerTime fans – deserved better than this absolute codswallop. Give Burger Man a hard miss, unless you’re curious to see just how bad it really is.