Big Burger

Big Burger is a Nintendo 64 homebrew game by Allie and released on 13 December 2020. This game has you stacking up a burger higher and higher until it can stack no more.. This game was made for the 64brew game jam 2020.

You can download the ROM and source code from the download page for this homebrew game by using the password hanbagabyallie or see the source code on Github and download from Drive (PAL, NTSC).

Big Burger style and gameplay

Big burger is a fairly simple minigame. Slices of burger ingredients come flying by and you have to press the A button to stop them in their place. Keep on stacking ingredients on top of each other to get a high score. Pressing A while the ingredient is too lopsided will make you lose a life. Lose three and the game is over.

As the slice moves across, it gets smaller and smaller. I don’t see what the effect of the different slice types are, or what the size of the slice upon dropping does. They might have an effect on the score, but I´m not sure. Small slices get blown up larger after being placed so the difficulty of placing the next piece isn’t affected. There’s an indicator in the top-left that tells you the upcoming slices, but it doesn’t really serve much purpose.

There are six different slice types:

  • Tomato (red octagon)
  • Onion (white octagon]
  • Cheese (yellow square)
  • Lettuce (corrugated green)
  • Meat patty (brown octagon)
  • Top/bottom bun (special, only the first and last piece)

After the game is over, the game displays a hamburger stacking upwards towards the heavens, a kind of instant replay of your game. The replay even includes all the deviations you made when stacking the burger, so it will be as wobbly as you built it.

‘Size’ theme

Size plays a part in two different ways within Big Burger. First off, the objective of the game is to build an ever-increasing tower of burger components. The other one is that the size of the slice gets smaller the longer you let it slide across.

Credits

The game was made by Allie. Just Allie.

Conclusion and Review

Big Burger is a fun little game. It is extremely simple game that follows a simple premise and a simple control scheme. It feels as though that it would fit in perfectly as a microgame in Warioware (in fact there is a similar concept in Fresh off the Grill) or as a rhythm game in Rhythm Paradise. It also bears a resemblance to an old Flash game I used to play 10+ years ago called Tower Bloxx where you stack apartment units to make buildings, except that the tower starts to sway as it got taller.

I like how the stack can veer off to one side, which makes it a strategic move to avoid getting ‘greats’ in favour of ‘goods’ that help align the burger towards the centre.

A straight burger is very easy to stack quickly since slices that fly from the left and right take the same time to reach the centre of the stack, but a lopsided one requires much more attention. It helps keep you on your toes as the game’s speed increases.

Though Big Burger is a simple game, it isn’t overambitious which works both in its favour and against it. Its simplicity means that there are very few places where it can go wrong making it glitch-free (from my testing) and plain fun. On the other hand, its repetitive nature gets a bit boring after a few playthroughs. A little bit of sound could have helped give it a little bit more oompf as well.

Overall the game is a good little bit of fun. It doesn’t keep your attention for too long, but it doesn’t really need to. It is what it is: a short, quick, to-the-point arcade game.

Now I need to get one of those Quadruple Bypass Burgers…

Articles across the web

Big Burger is a homebrew game by Allie made for the 64brew Game Jam 2020 where you stack a burger till you reach the heavens.
Article published on N64 Squid

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