Pressure Cooker
fulfills everyone's childhood fantasy of slaving away at the local McDonald's, and after working in the food service industry for a few years I can assure you that this game accurately portrays the frantic pace of the dreaded 12-1pm lunch hour rush during "buy one get one free" promo deal days.
You play as the only employee working in the kitchen of a burger joint (I assume your co-workers are outside smoking again) and it's your job to keep the customers happy. Orders appear at the bottom of the screen and it's your responsibility to assemble the proper ingredients onto burger patties traveling down a conveyor belt whose speed slowly increases over time. To make matters worse, the ingredients shoot out of storage boxes on the edge of the screen in a fairly random order. If that tomato you're needing pops out, snag it and place it on the burger. If cheese comes out instead and nobody wants any cheeseburgers any time soon, push the fire button to send it back. Once the burger's done grab the bun, place it on top, and run the whole thing onto another screen and drop it into the proper colored bin. Screw up during any of this and lose points, and once all points are gone the game's over and you're fired.
The game starts out fairly easy but as time goes on not only does the conveyor belt move faster the orders become more complex and the ingredients pop out more randomly. The entire time I was playing I kept imagining customers screaming "I don't want lettuce, I SAID I WANTED CHEESE" to which I'd reply "You didn't tell me you didn't want lettuce, you're getting lettuce, TOO #*$*@ BAD!!!!" It was like some horrible Post Traumatic Stress Disorder flashback and I ended up curled up into the fetal position and sobbed like a little girl. It's that good.
Graphics are fairly detailed for an Atari cart, you can even see the burgers being passed over the flames of the oven before being plopped down on the belt. Ingredients look exactly like they're supposed to and the chef has that cute little mustache. Sound consists of a few "blaps" and "dings" and an annoying tune that keeps repeating over and over and OVER until it makes you want to bang your head into a wall, but other than that minor bit of aggravation, it's a damn fun game.
