Food Fight

An archaic computer simulator of lunch without a single instinct for fun. Food Fight is one of those titles that look like a game, have the code of a game, but the experience reminds you more of a compulsive desire to count seconds until shutdown.

It's an arcade clone — a shooter in details that some unknown maker controlled sometime in the first half of the nineties on DOS. You find yourself in what seems like a kitchen where you move between pieces of food and shoot at... also pieces of food? Actually it's not entirely clear what's going on with what. The title doesn't sound quite right and the concept gets lost between direction and negligence. The goal exists, but more like something the game forces rather than forces you toward.

Controls are exactly what you'd expect from a 486 in a storage room corner. Direction, shooting, and then long waits until something moves. Animations are simple to primitive — the character crawls like a stepped-on lump of mud. Sounds? More like tonal vibrations that are called sound. Graphics are solidly dark and colorful, but without grace, without character, without anything that would make you want to look at this particular spot on the screen. Level encounters unfold without tension — there's no danger, just waiting.

Food Fight is the archetype of a game that probably had one instruction sheet on A4 paper and the authors regretted there was space left. A breath of cold calculation — how much diskette space it takes, how much fits in the package, how many people will buy it to shift units. The game lacks what distinguished even second-rate arcades: those few brilliant ideas, rhythm, colorful thinking.

Today you play this game only because it exists. Archaeologically. You want to see what a cooling tower of the mid-nineties looked like when the programmer was neither talented nor clumsy — just anonymously average. It's sadder than a bad game. It's a boring game, and that's the worst verdict that can fall on an arcade.