Food Fight for the Atari 7800! The game where you throw food at chefs in the quest to eat an ice cream! The game is about to be rereleased on the Atari 2600 Plus, but as I already have the game numerous times, I’m going to take a look at the 7800 version as it has been rereleased on the Atari VCS. This is the same version of the game, but in the interest of clarity, I won’t be able to comment on how it runs on the Atari 2600 Plus or the original 7800 console.
A few years ago, the Atari 2600 Plus launched, and it gave players a new way to play their original Atari 2600 cartridges. But that wasn’t all, as the 2600 Plus will also allow you to play your original Atari 7800 games. But heck, a lot of the 2600 and 7800 carts are thirty plus years old. With this in mind Atari have released a bunch of new cartridges to give players a chance to fill out or start their collections.
Whilst the first batch of games were all games designed for the 2600, the next batch of releases were all ones that originally released for the 7800. Of these games, the one I was most excited about was Food Fight as it’s probably my favourite 7800 game.
In the game you play as Charley, a generic Dennis the Menace (American version) looking boy, who will start each level on the right side of the screen, and you have to get to the left side of the screen to eat an ice cream. Sounds simple right? Well, between you and your intended ice cream snack is an army of chefs who for some reason I’ve never quite figured out, don’t want you to eat the ice cream. There are also pits that you can fall into that you’ll have to dodge.
To make matters worse, the chefs will throw food at you, and if they catch you, hit you with food or fall in a pit, you lose a life. The good news is that you can also pick up any of the food items that are scattered about the levels to throw at the chefs too.
The levels appear to be randomly generated, and if you restart a level after you lose a life the location of the ice cream, chefs and objects in the stages may change.
There are 125 levels in total, although the number doesn’t really mean anything as like I said, all the levels are basically the same and change when you play them through multiple times.
The game does feel repetitive quite quickly, but reaching level 125 isn’t the toughest thing ever, so with a little perseverance you can get through to the end before you’ll get fed up. Some levels are easy as apple pie to beat because of good fortune of where the enemy chefs start, and others can be a thrilling chase as you dodge in and out of where the chefs and pits are.
Having played this across a few releases, including on Atari 50, which is the computer version, and the Evercade Atari Collection 1, and Atari GameStation Pro, both of which are also the 7800 version, I’ll be honest that even though this Atari VCS release is the 7800 game, it isn’t as well presented as these other versions.
The graphics look slightly fuzzy and blurry and are not the sharp pixel perfect look as in the other releases. Also on Atari VCS, you can press the home button, and it actually brings up the menu for the Mame emulator which I was very surprised to see as accessible even if they had used it. This does let you tinker with the graphics slightly, but after a few minutes of rotating the screen and messing up the colour, I gave up toying with it.
The Atari 2600 Plus games have regularly seen sales on the UK Amazon store, so whilst I’ve held off getting the new cart for now, I imagine I’ll get the actual cart to add to my collection sooner rather than later.
What would you rate this game?
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