Bobby Burgers - La Hamburguesa

Bobby Burgers - La Hamburguesa is the Spanish release of a game that first appeared in 1983 as Barmy Burgers from the British outfit Blaby Computer Games. Gary Capewell wrote it, and it is a very open variation on the arcade hit BurgerTime.

The principle matches the original. The screen is built from tiers of platforms with the components of a hamburger laid out across them — buns, patties, lettuce. Run across a component and it drops one level. The goal is to stack every piece at the bottom and assemble a complete half-pounder. The fastest route is to stay on top of the pile, because a falling piece drags down whatever is underneath it.

Two sausages and a fried egg chase you. Your defence is pepper: sprinkle a pursuer and it is stunned and sent back to the top of the screen. You only get five doses per chef, though, so it is an emergency measure, not a strategy. Points come from crossing ingredients, from crushing an enemy between falling pieces and from using pepper, with the crushing worth most — which pushes you to take risks.

Controls are keyboard (5, 6, 7, 8 for direction and 0 for pepper) or joystick via Kempston or the A.G.F. interface, and one curiosity of the original cassette is that each side of the tape held a version for a different interface.

It has aged exactly the way 1983 clones age. The graphics are coarse, collisions are occasionally unfair, and difficulty rises mainly by speeding up your pursuers. The ZXDB score sits around six out of ten — a fair number for an honest but derivative take on someone else's good idea.