Food Fight

Food Fight is a launch-ish throwback one-screen shooter for the 7800 with a simple enough premise: fight your way across the arena (née screen) to scarf down a chronically melting cone, picking up sufficient culinary ammo to pelt a gaggle of sous chefs impeding your progress. Like -some- single screen multi-directional shooters of its day, the level layouts are completely random (even between level resets), resulting in what can only be coined some very cheap RNG deaths due to almost impossible pathing layouts. Due to the brutally conservative hit boxes, you'll know you're mince meat 5 seconds before the coup de souffle. Any chefs you blast with a banana will return through one of the many... portals? sprawled across the floor, ensuring a Robotron meets Pac-Man vibe of attack, retreat, advance.

But hey, yr gonna expect issues from the mid-80s. So what are are the happier takeaways--high sprite counts? Fun, madcap 15-minute inning play? Sure, but when General Computer Corporation heralded a "new and improved" version of their cult classic for Atari's new home system, they apparently only focused on stability and performance. This was 1986, folks: a game from 1983 would have felt 15 years old with the advent of the NES, and while this is a *fun* game in short stretches even now, there's probably no reason not to just emulate the proper arcade version. GCC definitely rushed their product, ignoring the opportunity to improve the AI scripts a touch and maybe, you know, incorporate that whole 2nd face button thing.

There are some good, if not almost thoughtful, design touches and decisions: the baddie chefs will occasionally team up on you or even attack each other after they go full Bear and lose their shit early shift; peppering the screen with the inexhaustible watermelon is strangely relaxing; and the feel of the game is quite good after the speed kicks up >1.5x on Stage 13.

Ultimately, I'm left feeling much as I did after ravaging Baltimore in the 7800's exquisitely functional Rampage: having never owned an Atari system, I always expected a level of polish and detail from arcade adaptations as a kid (slowdown and flicker be damned). And upon reflection, this is probably where the 7800 apologists wagon up... (point conceded!). While games like Food Fight in every way paved the way for everything from Guardian Legend to Blinding of Isaac to, heh, Vampire Survivors, the primitive 'n limited execution dripping like so much Boston Cream Pie throughout shoo-shoo this to the museum status.

Although I really dislike and wouldn't want to make light of food abundance considering it's a first-world privilege and that millions are starving, Food Fight on the 7800 is fantastic. The general goal is to just get from one end of the screen to the other, and on the stage you have piles of food which you can just pelt onto oncoming enemies. The game is really a shooter, but a brilliant element that plays inside it is that if you hold down the fire button while walking in a pile of food, you can shoot a truly spectacular and overpowered volley on all fronts, and it's a joy to watch.

The number of sprites being rendered was what made 7800 a real player and Food Fight is the ideal tech demo to show it.

Fun fact: This might be the earliest game to feature a sports-like action replay!