Not only is this a Let's Play, but also a review of the game as well.
Imagine making burgers at some place like McDonalds or Wendy's or Jack-In-The-Box. Now, make it more fun. Yeah, that's better. Now, add enemies like sentient pickles, fried eggs and hot dogs that want you dead. Congratulations, you have an arcade game that would be ported to many systems, including the Atari systems, Intellivision, Colecovision and also the NES.
Since this is obviously the Intellivision Fab Five, I'm going to go ahead and cover the Intellvision version, especially since I've given this bad boy a shot myself.
Here, you're running around doing...what else? Making some gigantic burgers. Just walk over the buns, the burgers, the lettuce, and the meat until it's completely flattened. They'll go down one level or to the first level that has something on it. You can also knock down all the toppings to the bottom like dominoes. As you're doing this, sentient pickles, eggs and hot dogs want you dead. You'll have to slip past them as you do your job and get people fed.
An interesting note about this version of the game. When you either start the game or when you die and get taken back to the screen that shows what level you're on, you can tell what the five enemies are for the level as they're all coming at you only for you to be whisked away to the gameplay screen. At the beginning, it's four hot dogs and an egg. When you hit Level 5, it'll be two hot dogs, two pickles and an egg. When you lose all your lives, the enemies finally destroy you on the Game Over screen.
The enemies have some AI here. They always seem take the shortest path to you no matter what, but in actuality have their own pattern. This can be predictable at times but unpredictable at others. You can be cornered and not know it until it's too late, and you'll be dead in a matter of seconds unless you have a pepper spray shot you can use to stun them. You only have a few shots of pepper before you're completely defenseless, and you'll need to pick up some french fries, ice cream cones, cups of coffee, ketchup bottles and other non-sentient foods in order to add one shot to your pepper spray.
It's not perfect, however. If the enemy is right next to you - and I mean, right next to you - the pepper shot will appear behind the enemy and you're dead. If the enemy is in front of you but not up in your grill, you're in perfect range. If he's able to breathe into your face, you're dead and there's nothing the pepper spray can do to save you. It's like you have to shoot it a fraction of a second ahead of time.
Even worse, if any part of the enemies touch you, you're dead. The enemy's head touched your feet? You're dead. Their feet touch your head? Yup, you're dead there, too. I know that this is common with first and second-generation consoles, as well as some games on third-generation consoles, but come on.
There is one good thing about the AI, though. You can basically have the enemies running around in circle if you know how to string them along, as the enemies can't double back in case you somehow get the slip on them and end up right behind them. They'll have to circle around in order to see you again.
If you really want to give them the big brush-off, wait for them to be on or below one of the various burger ingredients. When the ingredients fall, they'll either take the fall with it or gets squashed by whatever gets pushed downwards. Different enemies give you different amounts of points. Not sure how hot dogs would taste with hamburgers, but at least it makes sense because they go together because of how America is with hot dogs and hamburgers. Can't have one without the other. They just go together, because this is America. Pickles make perfect sense, since they've been on burgers since forever. Fried eggs? Well, there are some places that serve fried eggs on burgers, with Denny's being the most common example.
Doing this is somewhat of a science depending on which enemies you're trying to do this with. Sometimes, enemies are seemingly easy to manipulate into falling for your traps, but other times instead of going straight for you, they'll go in a different direction such as up a ladder at the last second. Either way, this is a good strategy for getting extra points, because you're need them to get the extra lives and survive into the later levels. It's even more impressive when one topping falls on the next, which falls on the next, which falls on the next until the one at the bottom is at the bottom of the screen and enemies get killed in the process. It's so wonderful it's almost sadistic, and it almost makes you wonder why these foods just grew legs and came after you.
If you do that, though, you'll have to remember where the enemies disappeared when they either fell to their deaths or got crushed by burger toppings before they gave you points, because sometimes this is the exact area where the enemies will respawn after a few seconds, if not from the sides of the screen at the top of the stage.
The levels have simple layouts at the beginning, but as you progress they become more complex at times. This leads to situations where you may get completely surrounded by both sides on a platform and the ladders that lead up and down are pretty far away from you, which will cause you to use a pepper spray shot in order to get out of it. Also, the graphics are bigger, so don't expect a lot of floors and ladders to move around in like in the arcade original.
Another big gripe I have is with the controls. Now, you may be thinking, "PrinceWatercress, the controller is just telephone buttons and some circle for a D-Pad!" Here's the kicker. When you're going from a floor to a ladder, you can't just stopping holding Left or Right and then press Up and Down like with the cross-shaped D-pads modern gamers are used to. Instead, you have to roll your thumb from the side to the top or bottom like you're trying to pull off Hadokens in Street Fighter II. This is off-putting at first, but as you get used to this and see what makes the AI in this game tick, you'll be able to breeze through at least the first few screens.
You get an extra life at every 10,000 points. While this is expected, it would be slightly better to appreciate if you weren't dying all the time because of preventable mistakes being made because you're not used to the Intellivision controller or the AI. Once again, this is a moot point once you get used to the controller and the game's nuances.
Is this a bad game? No, not really. As a matter of fact, this is definitely one of the better games of the first half of the 1980s. It's worth picking up, but if you're not used to the Intellivision controller, be prepared for a heck of a learning curve.
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