043 · BURGERTIME
Forget Thanksgiving leftovers, we're hungry for burgers! But only the kind that chase you and haunt your dreams. For more NESTALGIA as well as show notes and articles go to www.nestalgiacast.com
BurgerTime is Data East's 1982 arcade game, and it reached the NES in 1987 looking much as it did then. You are Peter Pepper, a chef who builds giant burgers by walking over the ingredients while hot dogs, eggs and flying pickles chase you. All four of us (Mike, Sean, Sam and Joe) were on this one, and we spent as much time on the nightmare logic as on the gameplay. We settled on a bad dream in which every food he has overcooked comes for him.
What it gets right
- The core idea is original. Walk across a bun and it drops to the next level, and knocking a stack into a single burger plays like nothing else we have covered. The movement feels like Mario and Popeye, but the falling burgers are new.
- There is a hidden strategy. Crushing enemies under falling ingredients is the obvious method, but enemies tailing you when you cross a bun ride it down. Each extra enemy drops the ingredient another level, so you want a crowd behind you and can finish a burger in one sweep. That discovery softened us a little.
- Dying is forgiving. Lose a life without a game over and the board isn't reset. When you're a lettuce and a bun from victory, that matters.
- It gets better late. Level five gives you double burgers, and difficulty is uneven enough that some levels may be easier than earlier ones. There are six, then they repeat.
Where it falls apart
- The ladders. They are bare rungs with no sides, and it is hard to tell whether you are on a platform or a ladder, especially coming down. You have to be in a perfect spot to get off, and that killed us several times. We called it worse than Donkey Kong.
- Crowding. On level one you have six or seven enemies on screen within a minute, and they speed up. You get about four pepper shots, and each only stuns for half a second.
- One voice. The music is monophonic, an arcade tune dropped onto a console that can layer sounds. We played on mute to keep testing, and the music took us out of the game fastest.
- A mess of pixels. The art looks like a gross mess, on par with Popeye, in a port that looks like the Intellivision version. We also never understood why ice cream is a good bonus and hot dogs are not.
Beyond the game
Plenty of people praise this one. It won a certificate of merit in a 1984 awards category, and the fried egg shows up in a Futurama episode, Pixels and Wreck-It Ralph. The manual's line "making hamburgers is the basic purpose of this game" was where we knew it wasn't going to be for us.
The bottom line
Skip it. In the Essential Games List vote all four of us said no, a "four nose." Mike, who went first, called the NES version a bad port and a definite no, though an arcade cabinet at 25 cents is worth a shot as a relic. We said to play Wrecking Crew instead, and that Overcooked is how you make a food game. If you love BurgerTime, write in and tell us what we missed.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
It's the ultimate kitchen confrontation, BurgerTime!
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. I'm Sam. And I'm Joe. Guys, are you hungry? Oh, so hungry. Yes. It's a cookout over here, right? Yeah. Oh, man. Do I have the perfect game for you right now? It's a little game called... It's called Mock Rider. Oh, man. No. You can't always be hungry for Mock Rider. I'm always hungry for Mock Rider. I know, but some people, like, barely like that game.
Like, there are some people that, like, that wouldn't even cross onto their top 25. Well, those people can play this game. Who are those people? Yeah, they're probably... I'm just saying, they're probably, like... Maybe it'd be on their top 25 right now out of everything we've covered, but not, like, in their definitive library. And so they're probably like, wow, these guys love Mock Rife. If they mention it one more time, I'm gonna turn off the podcast. Well, check on. So that's why we're bringing Burger Time today. Burger Time it is, all right? Burger Time. Data East. Yeah. Everybody... The connoisseurs of...
I don't even know what. Yeah, no, they're really... Because they're the connoisseurs of nothing. That's why. It's like, they don't have a title. Because you have to be good at something to be a connoisseur of it. So this is Data East, and it's Data East all the way back to...
1982 is when the game came out in the arcades. And it looks honestly not that much different in 1987 on the NES. Yeah, I just... I keep coming back to these games that just don't look good in 1987, where when... I guess if it's coming from the arcade, I can kind of see, like, a downgrade is necessary.
But this game sort of looks on the same par as Popeye. Yeah, I was gonna say Popeye right away. And the reason for that is because remember how, like, janky... Not janky. Like, no design whatsoever was put into, like, the staircases in Popeye. Yeah. It's the same thing here. I would say these are the worst. Yeah, these are some of the worst staircases. They're ladders, right? Ladders, sure. These are the worst ladders I've ever seen. Yeah. Mechanically as well. Yeah, there are only rungs.
There are no sides to the ladders. Yeah, yeah. The game is best known as, like, its Intellivision port in the home console. Because apparently, like, it played so well on the Intellivision. That's how people, like, remember it. But this NES version looks like an Intellivision version. Yeah, exactly. You know, it doesn't... It's missing a couple bits, you know? And I know that that's, like, that's actually not true. Like, you know, you can't talk about games like that. But, like, I'm not saying from a technical standpoint. I'm saying, like, it's literally, like, missing.
Just visually. Peter Pepper. Peter Pepper the chef. And, uh, you play as him in a, what I can only assume is a very scary alternate timeline. Post-apocalyptic. No. This is the Mock Rider kitchen. Is he feeding giants? Here's what I think this actually is. This is a subconscious, like, this is a nightmare that he's having where all of the hot dogs and eggs that he has wronged in the past, he's burnt, overcooked. He's a fry cook. And they're mad because it's burger time, and it's not hot dog time, and it's not egg time. I love the idea that every nightmare starts with him looking at his watch, and it doesn't say a time or anything, it just says burger time.
Like the start screen. Burger time 30. It's burger o'clock. And so, actually, I really like that interpretation, Sean, of, like, that this is all just, like, some crazy dream. Because that makes me feel a lot better than, like, he's been enslaved to work for another planet to make the American delicacy of burgers.
For these aliens that, like, also happen to have sentient hot dogs. But, you know, if he's enslaved, then why would the aliens be sending these people, or allowing these people to try and kill him? Well, it's like a gladiator. They are not. Yeah, but don't they want burgers, too? Do you think these are, like, just people in food mascot suits? Like, this is the food. That is clearly, like, an actual fried egg. Just chasing you. And, like, if he's a pickle just flips around, like, it's not a person.
That's just a pickle. There's no face on it. There's no face on it? Is there other legs? There are legs, though, right? Anyway, okay, so, okay, what are we doing in this game? Yeah, okay, that's important. So, Sean, I feel like you should take us through it, since you're the most level-headed person about the game.
So, I guess the closest thing I can say is that it is this abstract nightmare realm of oversized burgers that are just sitting on these platforms, and you have to climb these really clunky stairs and knock down all of the ingredients, which are in order, like, vertically, but you have to make them all into a single patty below. And all I have to do is walk over them, and they'll fall down into, like, a pan or something on the bottom.
However, you do have anthropomorphized hot dogs, eggs, and not so- Pickles. And just pickles. Like, they're not- It's not even, like, a human pickle. It's just, like, flying pickles. Yeah, I don't think I picked up on that. Yeah, that are just trying to destroy you as you- Which reminds me of, like, the lima bean from Jimmy Neutron that came to life. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and then through the dream. Anyway, just- Do we keep talking about Jimmy Neutron? I just figured it was worth bringing up.
So, while you're doing that, these foods are also trying to stop you from making burgers. I don't know, maybe because they're, like, maybe the burgers are their friend, and you are going to kill the friend. Yeah, wait, it's a lot like Sausage Party, if you think about it, right? Whoa. Oh, yeah, you're right. I haven't seen it. You know where it's- Well, I'm just saying, don't watch it, first off. No, I've heard it's not great. Yeah, it's not great. But, like, yeah, they're, like, trying to- You know, it's like the hot dogs are, like, they're next on this barbecue.
Yeah, maybe, yeah. Like, after the burgers are done, the hot dogs are clearly coming up. And then come the eggs. The only thing that you have to defend yourself against these reanimated foods is, like, a pepper shaker. Because you're Peter Pepper the Chef. Yeah. I never- I kept thinking, like, bell peppers.
No, no. I didn't realize that. Yeah. You have a finite amount of shakes in that, though. Yeah, you only have, like, the whole king. We don't want to get into strategy just yet, Joe. No? No strategy? I just want to- This is nostalgia. I just want to talk about the objective, which I think Sean's doing a pretty good job of. Sean, continue. And I think that's it. I mean, once you get all four burgers down, or however many burgers are on the screen, then, like, you have completed that nightmare. And then we move on to the next night. Yeah, you've definitely described a nightmare here. Yeah. You've definitely described a nightmare.
All right. So, now, I guess, before we talk about the strategy, Joe, I'd like to just get, like- You gotta give me the schedule next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the notes are for me and for me only. I'd just like to take a quick look at the box art for this game, if everybody could refer to your box art. It's on page four. Because now, like, I can't get out the idea that this isn't a nightmare. Yeah, this can only be a nightmare. Like, if you look at Peter Pepper, first off, I did not think he looked like that. No. Yeah, he looks almost like a cross between a human and a pig.
You know, he's got like- Well, actually- He looks like the operation guy. Yeah, he does kind of look at the operation guy. He does, yeah. He's got a big red nose. What is the thing to the right of him, to his left? That, like, yellow- Is that a piece of cheese? What? The yellow thing that's gonna come on above it? We're looking at different pictures. You are looking at different pictures. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my picture. You gotta look at the NES version of the box art. I think- God, darn it. That's not the NES one, I don't think.
Yeah, you're right. This is a creepier stuff on here. There's cheese on there. Yeah, but she's not trying to- Hard-boiled eggs. She's trying to seduce him. And he's like, hey, let me get on that burger. And he's like, uh-uh. Uh-uh. It's a kosher burger. We're lost. Yeah, you failed on the very first time we talk about box art. You guys have failed me. So we'll just get right back into the game now.
I'm trying over here, Mike. I'm doing my best. So the game is just, you know, it's like any other arcade game. There's a finite amount of levels, and then they just kind of repeat when they're done. There are six levels in total. And I would say that they do get harder, but it starts off pretty hard. It starts off pretty hard, and I think it- I wouldn't say it peaks at two, because I got through two and then to three.
I think it actually gets really good at like five, because then you're making like double burgers. Yeah. What do you call it? Double hamburger, right? Because there's no cheese, really. Is there cheese? I think there's cheese. I could never tell what that thing was. I guess it's cheese. Honestly, they all look kind of just like a mess of pixels. Like everywhere is just like a gross mess. So you have a double cheeseburger on like level five. I think that's pretty cool. You're right. Yeah. They do vary.
It's not like a very- it's not a straight line in terms of the difficulty. It sort of varies in the later- Sure. It's kind of like in Donkey Kong, how like whichever version you play, like the order of the stages changes, because there's no like exact difficulty. Like some people might have an easier time on level five than they would on level two, but you got to get through all of them. I however just like, I couldn't do it. I know that there's a strategy to getting them in the correct spot, so you don't have to keep using your pepper to get out of it.
But I kept getting surrounded by these crudes. Yeah. Well, maybe that's because there's like 11 of these guys on the screen. Like it starts- And they get faster too. Yeah. But like even on level one, we're talking about like one minute into the game and you've got six to seven enemies already on the screen. That's not okay. And you got like what? Four sprays of pepper you can use? Total for like the whole game. And you're done. Yeah.
I kept trying to find a way to get pepper back. Is there not a way to do that? I don't know why you get pepper back if you get the extra foods, I think. Oh, that's what you got to do? Yeah. Good luck collecting that stuff. I don't get that. Like why are you collecting ice cream? It's burger time. No, no, no. Okay, come on. You can't have ice cream with the burgers. Yeah. It's like a diner. That's all this diner food. I guess, but like the hot dogs are bad, but the ice cream is good. It feels very arbitrary.
We need to figure out what's going on in the universe of burger time. I think it would be a lot harder for ice cream to chase you. Yeah. Eggs can easily chase you. Everyone knows that. Cause they're so runny. Whoa. Wow. There you go. First, uh, real joke. All right. That's all for you guys.
I'll see you next week. Yeah. But I think the pepper thing like annoyed me as a feature because it's like, it's something that proves like incredibly useless. Like once you figure out like, oh, all it does is like stun them for like half a second. Like, it's not even like a good strategy to be like, well, I'll get him under the bun and then I'll climb up to the bun and crush him. Because sorry guys that we didn't mention this. That's the only way to get rid of enemies is to crush them by dropping the ingredients to below them. That's actually not entirely true. Oh, let me hear. If they are tailing you close enough and you happen to run across a patty or bun or lettuce and they're on that, that ingredient, they will fall down. Wow. To their death.
And actually that is what turns out to be the strategy is you want as many enemies tailing you as quick, uh, as close as possible because each additional enemy, uh, makes that ingredient fall down that many levels. Can I say that you might've changed the game? That is, it has strategy. I don't like the game at all, but it has some strategy there. Whereas if you have enough enemies, you could basically complete your burger in one swell fell swoop.
Huh. Interesting. Yeah. That changes my, yeah, that does, that does change a lot for me too. But so let me get this straight. You're saying that the, the number of enemies that are on the ingredient on the top will like carry over down. And yeah, I think that like, let's say that you, uh, you walk over the top bun and you got like three enemies, uh, following you and they all fall with the bun. I think then it would take your bun down to your lettuce and your lettuce down to your cheese, maybe even the cheese down to the patty itself. And then it's all right there.
And since we were talking about the stairs earlier, I just want to mention how easy it was to die on the stairs. Not because like so many enemies are chasing you from different directions, but because it's almost impossible to know when you're on the platform and on the stair. Oh yeah. Especially coming down. I would keep it in Kong. It's worse than, uh, in Donkey Kong sometimes where you're Mario and you like think that you're up on the platform, but you have to like maybe just hit the up on the D-pad a little more. Yeah. Before you can keep walking to the left or right. In this one, it's like, you have to be because, especially because you can go down to the next part of the ladder in between the two platforms.
It's like, you have to be in a perfect spot that just can't move it. And so that was actually my doom several times. That was the trickiest part for me was like how quickly I was dying on these ladders. But you mean like accidentally on the ladders. Accidentally. That happened to me too, where you were, you think you're on the floor and then suddenly you cross a ladder and now you're just stuck to the ladder. Yeah. You're stuck to the ladder and it's like, jump.
Right. You're right there. Get off of that. So that wasn't, that wasn't a particular favorite of mine. And another thing that wasn't a particular favorite of mine was the music in this game. Oh my God. It's, it's, it's monophonic. There's only one. Like the thing is about the NES is that it can play multiple sounds on top of each other. And they just chose not to do that for the music.
They took the, um, the arcade song. I'm at, I'm imagining. And they're like, you know what? We don't need to change anything. And NES can run all this stuff and more. So we don't need to do more. We can just keep it. There's one song. Oh my God. It's just, it was, it was so frustrating. I think that was one of the most frustrating parts about the whole thing.
Yeah. I think, you know, if, if not on top of the dying in the stairs thing, I think the music took me out of the game the fastest. Yeah. If, if that's okay to say, like, not that, you know, like, like a thing that's not even necessarily directed to the gameplay. It just, for some reason, like the music was too much for me. It would have been better without music. So do you, yeah. Do you think that if you played this game on mute, it would, it would gain a star? I wound up doing that.
I eventually just said, you know what? I'll just play this game on mute to continue testing it because there was no other way to get this done. I will tell you. I love that you say testing it. Yeah. Testing this game. You're not playing. I was, I'll tell you, I knew right. That's what I was going to say. I knew right away that this game wasn't like for me, you know, but I was willing to like,
you know, this is a, this is one of those classic arcade games. Yeah. I guess. It has, no, it definitely has a following. I thought there was going to be, I actually thought there was going to be a little more to it or a little more excitement around it because of how much, because I've heard of this game before. You weren't unexcited about burgers? I was not excited about it. It's like, you know, just burgers in Nightmare Land.
I looked this game up online after I gave it a first playthrough and I was like, wow, this game, I, this game sucks. I don't like this game. And I looked it up and everyone's like praising this game. They're talking about, oh, the graphics are bad, but the mechanics are great. So it makes up for it. I'm like, what the heck is going on? I saw. I saw on Wikipedia. There was a reference to a magazine of the time period that said it was the best arcade game of 1982. What the heck? It did. It won a certificate of merit in the category of 1984 video game of the year, less than 16 kilobytes of ROM category.
And maybe that's what I read. Yeah. First off, like the, all of that's jargon. Yeah. They get it. It won a video game award in 1984, but it came out in 82. There was, there was apparently five, at least five annual Arky awards.
So we can assume that it missed out on the first two. Yeah. And then the Deseret news called burger time. One of the real surprises of 1983 for the Intellivision and then gave the ColecoVision version three and one half stars. Yeah. The fact that this, the Wikipedia article for this game even has a legacy section is beyond me. Well, it did get ports and sequels. But so did a lot of bad games. Yeah. No, I'm not saying that in defense of it. I'm just saying like, there is like a bit of a legacy here. If we can transition over to that segment, if you will. So the, the, the fried egg has actually even just.
It's. Isn't that joining smash? I was. That's amazing. The fried egg into smash. Everyone is here. You joke. Yeah. You joke, but doesn't like a Pac-Man throw like, no, he throws a couple of Pac-Man. Game and watch. Game and watch flips fried eggs. Yeah. But that's not. Yeah. That's from the game and watch thing. But that is cool. What I was going to say is that the fried egg appeared in an episode of Futurama.
Oh, did it? Does anybody remember that episode where, um, uh, it's like an anthology episode. So there's like three shorts in the episode, but it's the one where the video game, uh, like the video game war happens and, uh, they do the space. And it's like space invaders and the general Pac-Man. I don't remember the, the egg, but I remember the episode. Um, who's the, who's like the villain in that episode that he's a normal character. Is that Branigan? Yeah.
Uh, no, no, no, not that Branigan. Um, Lur from Oricron Percy I ate. Sure. I don't know if you draw one of them. Do you want to eat humans? No, he's a, he's like a dinosaur looking character. I think it might be Lur. Okay. He comes off of his ship and he makes a very funny joke about space invaders where he's like, ha, you were shooting at me instead of where I was going to be, you know?
But then he gets off the ship followed by Donkey Kong and Q-Bert, who's apparently evil. And then the fried egg. Wow. Fried egg as a character. What a drop of reference. That's a journey right there. So yeah, he must've loved Burger Time. Yeah. I could see that as a game that Fry would've played though. Yeah. Fried egg.
Fry. Yeah, we are just having fun. The game, it has this, I can kind of see, I don't really think it has charm, but it's weird, you know? Yeah. It's a weird game. And so I can see how someone playing a bunch of bad games would see this one and be like, oh, this one's bad, but it's kind of weird. So I like it. I don't know. It's just weird and abstract as a lot of other arcade games that try to... Because my... Sorry. No, no, no. My first thought about it was like, this is already not my type of game.
Yeah. I was like, I'm not a big fan of these arcade games. I didn't even like the Donkey Kong games that much. Whoa. I know. But I was like, this isn't going to be my style of game. But I was wondering how much you guys liked it. Because I thought this was like a very popular game. So I thought maybe I was going to be the odd man out here. No, it's a popular game, but we're just clearly not digging it. Yeah. No, you can go. You can go. Okay. You know, the moment I knew I wasn't going to like this game. Let me hear. So I read the manual before most of the games that I play, right? Uh-huh. And in the how to play section, it says, making hamburgers is the basic purpose of this game. And I read that and I was like, oh, no.
You can actually, yeah, you can put this down on your resume when you apply to McDonald's. Well, I played Burger Time, so I know how to make a hamburger. The Data East copy editors are some of like my favorite writers.
Yeah. I was like, oh, great. And so Peter Pepper, you know, speaking of legacy, he also showed up in Pixels, that Adam Sandler movie, which is essentially the plot of that Futurama episode. I'm just going to say, it's very similar. If you think about it. And he also showed up in Wreck-It Ralph, which is a little bit more respectable of a movie. A little bit. The sequel tried to kill it completely. I didn't know there was a sequel. Yeah. Wreck-It Ralph 2, Ralph Breaks the Internet. Oh, I didn't know that it came out.
What? I didn't know that it was already out. Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure it came out. It did? No. It didn't come out. Really? It's great. Well, probably by the time this episode came out, so I can be safe to say that it was bad. Maybe. The Statue of Libertations is... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll find out. Let us know how you like Wreck-It Ralph 2, Break the Internet. People from the future. Yeah. For the record, we're recording this on November 18th, 1992. So... Alright, so I think that's about it for my straight thoughts. Anybody else have anything, or should we move in together?
I guess my only straight thought, which I thought was decent of them to do, unless I... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like when you die, and you didn't complete... You know, you didn't get a game over, you just die once, it doesn't reset your board. Yes. Which I felt like was going to be something that was going to happen. That's a decent human being. Nice of you to do that to me. They had at least some common decency. No, I agree. I appreciated that as well, because there were some times where I was like, maybe just,
you know, a bun and a lettuce away from victory. Which isn't that just the way it goes? Yep. You know, he's just a lettuce and bun away from victory. But, you know, they let you have it the exact same way. Which I imagine would take some, for the NES at least, some kind of comprehensive coding to like, figure out all the different various spaces. I guess. Some sort of memory. Yeah. Probably just generate a password, you know, whatever. Any whoozle. That's all I got, so I think we'll move right into the Essential Games List.
All right, it's the Essential Games List. And if you don't know how that works, basically, we're looking at these NES games in 2018. We're not looking at them as great NES games or great games of just 1987, the year that BurgerTime came out on the NES. We're talking about, are they still worth playing today? You know, there's not many games based on foods anymore. No. So, you know, there's nothing I can really compare this to. Cooking Mama. We did just, you and I, and our producer, audio producer Chris, just played Overcooked. Yes. And that's what I was thinking of. I was like, that's how you make a food game. So you could play Overcooked or Cooking Mama, and you're like, hmm, well, what's BurgerTime? Let's go back to our roots.
And you might try that. So we're going to try and tell you whether you should or shouldn't do that. And to make things interesting, I'll kick it off this time. And I will let you know right off the bat that clearly I don't like BurgerTime. BurgerTime. Clearly, a lot of people do like BurgerTime.
However, I don't think that there is enough here to say like, oh, everybody's got to play this game. I think everyone can try this game and you'll find out very quickly. It's not one of those things where it's like, oh, well, if I invest enough time in it, I'm going to get better. Like, yeah, sure. That could be the same thing for anything. I think here it's like you figure out whether you want to continue playing or not. For me, the music got me first, then the increasing difficulty, then the inability to tell if I'm on the staircase or on the platform.
So I think the NES version is a definite no for me. I think it's a bad port. But if you're ever around an arcade and you see BurgerTime and it's only 25 cents, although knowing today's way of playing arcades, it's probably 50 to 75 cents. You know, if you see it, give it a shot. It's a cool like little relic from the past and it has its place in pop culture history, but I'm not going to recommend it to you.
All right. So I guess I'll go next. I do not recommend you play this game wherever you find it, but specifically the NES version, whether or not it's the music that gets on your nerves or you just don't like burgers. Um, this game is not in a very playable state at this point in time, and I really put a lot of weight into that. Um, this is pretty much a game about traversing platforms and stairs, not stairs, platforms and ladders. And if it's that hard, you have to be pixel perfect to get off that ladder. It's just not fun. It's a frustrating endeavor. Um, don't play this game. It's not essential.
Um, so you can play this game or you can go to the grocery store, get some lettuce, a bun, a burger, and some cheese if you want to, you know, and you can cook a burger while listening to music that has more than one instrument playing at the same time and throwing pepper at your friends. And that will be so much better than playing this game. You know, I think just making a burger on your own in your house is more fun than playing this game. Try just dropping them from like certain levels of height.
Yeah. Who's cooking the burger? Are we dropping like raw patties onto the, you know? Yeah. I don't know. I have so many more questions now that we're in the essential games part. Yeah. It's like, I'll give it this. It's, it's definitely an original concept. I don't think there's anything else that's like this in how it works. Like, yeah, like the movement is kind of like, uh, Mario and Popeye, but the mechanics of the burgers falling is kind of, is something that I haven't really seen before. Burgers falling. Yes. But like, but also like that doesn't make it good.
Yeah. But I'm actually going to take away even that point and saying, and then saying that it's that original because I would say that this shares too much of a lineage with like wrecking crew. This just plays like wrecking crew. Yeah. I guess, I guess it has wrecking crew. Yeah. Play wrecking crew instead of this one. Yeah. Wrecking crew is good. Uh, Joe, I definitely agree. Play wrecking crew instead of this, but, uh, yeah, I, right off the bat, I'm not the, the best guy to review this cause it's not, not my type of game.
Um, so I didn't enjoy it. I know, I know people out there do, but I, I don't really see the merit in it. And obviously coming off of these last three essential votes, I think that like my, uh, my opinion is not alone. So I would say I don't have too much more to add. I would just say not essential.
And there you have it. That is a four nose, uh, not to, not to be unexpected, I guess, by the way the episode went, but that's burger time in a nutshell. I just think, you know, sometimes you have to look at the, you know, we're reviewing it from an NES standpoint. We're not trying to find the optimal version of these games.
So don't, uh, you know, if you're a huge burger time fan from way back, you know, in the arcades, don't take it out on me. I was just playing the NES version. Exactly. I think what, what Mike really cares about right now is that you are not taking it out on Mike. Also, you take it out on me because I really hate this game. Sean said a lot of bad things about the game.
Yeah. If you are a burger time fan and you feel like you got to defend your opinion, like, give us a like, write to us, you know, let us know what, like, what is good about this game? Like something that we're missing or some, uh, you know, like some experience that you had with it that you think is memorable. Do you need an IQ of 500 to play this game? I mean, like to really, truly appreciate it. And you know, you can do that by sending an email to contact at nostalgia cast.com. N E S T A L G I A cast.com.
And, uh, you know, that's also the, uh, nostalgia cast.com is also our website. If you can believe it or not, nobody else bought that. We have that. And there we have, uh, all the show notes and, uh, articles on games and Miyamoto and, uh, links to our Twitch and our Twitter and our YouTube and Facebook.
Uh, which we rarely use, but Twitter's doing pretty good these days. We got a lot of that. Get the tweets. Yeah. We're doing okay on there. We got some interesting, like, you know, vault stuff like, uh, just, you know, really weird relics of Nintendo's past, uh, even before the NES. We, we do a lot of like the AVS, which, uh, not a lot of people know about, but that was what was going to be the Nintendo entertainment system before it became the Nintendo entertainment system. So all that kind of cool stuff is on the website. We're not gonna talk about that here on the podcast.
And, you know, I do, however, want one thing. Yeah. Uh, if you have a problem with any of our opinions, please at us, like on Twitter, like just do it. Just call out, uh, Sean, even on Twitter. Yeah. I'm not the one that's controlling it. You're just going to be making Mike's life a little harder, but please do it. I'd love to hear it. Uh, good and bad feedback is always good to know because we want you to listen every week. We publish episodes every Friday and, uh, that's all the time we have for this episode. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Film on Twitter, and I'll talk to you soon.
Oh, you're correct. Okay. Oh, wait. This is Mike. This is, uh, Mike's without Mike. Off the mic. Mike's off the mic. Yeah. Uh, this is Sean, your host. Uh, these are my two pals, Sam and Joe. Today we'll be deciding if Mike is an essential, uh, an essential podcaster. No, no, no. Is Mike an essential person? Can he justify being around? Like, all right, I'm going to say this.
Definitely, like, meet him, you know? Yeah. It's not, it's not like a skip it. Yeah. You know, but, uh, I don't know if it's, if it's essential. And Joe? Uh, I think just the music is just. Yeah. Music is too, you know, he's not, he's not a musician and that's like a big part of any NES games, so. Well, we're not talking about NES games, we're talking about people. No, sure, sure, but like. Is he an essential person?
His music's okay. Okay. So he's, he's, I wouldn't, I'm kind of in the same boat as Sam, you know? Yeah. Not a skip it for sure. Not a skip it. Definitely give it a try. He might be for you. I'm not going to keep him in my library. Thankfully, if, as long as you have 33% of the vote in one of these votes, um, you, you can be, uh, get added to the essential persons list. Um, and I'm going to vote for him on the essential persons list. If he wasn't around, we wouldn't even like have a reason to start this podcast, you know? All right. Well, you know, in the best people of 2018 vote, uh, I'm going to vote for him. When we bring this back. But it's not even just people. This is just off the mic. So it's only Mike every time.
So in the best mics of 2018, we'll, uh, we'll talk about this again. You know, we'll have the chance to, uh, to defend our opinions. I think he's the best mic on this podcast. Oh, that's without a doubt. But you know, better than any of these mics we speak into. Yeah. I would say so. Cause he's like sentient. Yeah. The cool thing about him is that when you speak into him, he'll, he'll talk back. Let's talk back. Yeah. Do you speak into his like his mouth? Into his ear. Oh yeah. That's where the sound goes. Okay. I think you're mistaken. These mics are sentient.
Oh, these are very shy then. In which case I expect much. No means of like contacting the outside world. Oh, the former beyond any. So it's like a, I have no mouth, but I'm a scream scenario. Okay. I gotcha. I do that. But it's like, I feel like that's what I'm like. It's more like I only have ears and I must scream. Yeah. Good. Yeah. I only have ears for you. Oh yeah. Um, one of the thing I wanted to, to get off my chest is, um, that I have a crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar circa 1999. And I don't know what to do about it because she's older now. Yeah. I don't think she's the same person anymore. And, uh, that's all we time we have.
We're just talking. That's all the time that Sean and Sam and I have to just chat. Yeah. We're just talking. We're going to start recording again. We have to start recording. Trevor- Trevor
