Burgertime
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Incterceptor 1984
Colecovision
I keep reading that the main selling point the Colecovision had back in the day was it's awesome arcade translations. Well where are they? Every game I play on this thing blows ass, where are all the cool games everyone was so hard-on about back in the day?
The Coleco translation of Burgertime comes pretty close. It's easy to look at games from this generation and heap copious amounts of Bag all over them. But we don't remember that home machines of the time rarely if ever had halfway decent translations of arcade games. Not only were the graphics and sounds usually nowhere close, sometimes entire gameplay elements were changed around. Console gaming in the early 80s really was a sad state of affairs for arcade purists.
Looked at in this context the Coleco version of Burgertime isn't half bad. All the elements are there and the graphics are faithful. The Chef's animation seems a little disjointed, like he's walking around with broken hips or something. He also seems to be pretty slow, one too many fried eggs I suppose. Control also seems a little sluggish like you're wading knee deep in quickly hardening pancake batter (of course it could just be because of the Colecovision's ridiculous monkey controller, though I doubt it.) But for the most part the game is a decent translation.
Also for some reason this version is pretty easy. Usually those little hotdogs and that fried egg bastard will shadow you, try to box you in, etc. Here they seem to merely follow you around and are pretty easy to outmaneuver. One thing I've never liked about this game is that there's no allowance for depth, the bounding box for each sprite covers the whole sprite instead of just the sprite's feet. Thus if you're on a platform and there's a hot dog bad guy ascending on a ladder below you, you would think you'd be safe until the evil food person actually climbed onto the platform you're on. But alas, merely touching his protruding head means instant death for Pepper the Chef, thus a lot of times I end up dying because I think I've got space to squeeze by.
Even with sluggish controls, funky animation, off sounds, and weird bounding box collision the game is still fun. I mean it's Burgertime man, come on. How can you screw this up?
Graphics: True to the arcade. The Chef's animation is wonky looking when he walks side to side, like it's painful for him to move or something. Everything else looks pretty good.
Sound: The Colecovision unfortunately cannot adequately recreate the sound for this game. The background music is made of basic, bassy tones, which totally misinterprets the lighthearted feeling the music is supposed to give.
Gameplay: Essentially intact, although it's much easier than the arcade version for some reason.