My heartfealt thanks to Rosemary Young of Quandary
for supplying the screenshots.

I had read a description of this game
a couple of years ago, and it sounded intriguing. I set about to get a copy, only
to find out how rare it was–in fact, I was beginning to think it was just a rumor.
Anyway, I finally lucked into a copy from someone on the Used
Game Trading Zone, so into the ol’ CD drive it went. However, I’m not quite
sure how useful this review will be to anyone else since it is so hard to get
your hands on this game. Oh, well, it’s not like I have anything better to do,
so here goes.

The story goes a little something like this: there is a certain
burger joint in the universe called, you guessed it, Orion Burger, that needs
an unending yet quickly dwindling supply of planetary protein matter to grind
into patties. Orion Burger’s top protein procurer is an oily green guy, er, thing
named Zlarg, who is not in the least morally or ethically troubled by the company’s
ban on harvesting intelligent life forms. He sets off into space with his sidekick,
Flumix, and detects an ample supply of protein on a little blue planet called
Earth. However, unbeknownst to either of them, a Planet Hugger named Astral has
stowed away aboard their spaceship. Are you with me so far? Okay, then, Zlarg
is forced by company policy to administer a battery of intelligence tests to a
specimen of the life form he intends to harvest. Here’s where you, as the hapless
human specimen, Wilbur, enter the picture. You are abducted by Zlarg. You of course
flunk the first intelligence test, it being rigged, and Zlarg instructs Flumix
to wipe your short-term memory and send you back to Earth. Meanwhile, Astral,
the Planet Hugger, has managed to damage the memory-wiping-and-sending-back machine
to the point where you retain your memory and are put back on Earth one hour prior
to your abduction. You must figure out how to beat the intelligence test before
you are reabducted; if you don’t, you flunk again and must start over, but if
you do beat the test, Zlarg rigs up another, harder test for you. The plot
gets an A because it was very entertaining and besides it explained what really
happened to the dinosaurs some 50 million years ago.

Gameplay, on the
other hand, is an exercise in frustration. This has got to be one of the hardest
games I have ever played. This is a part inventory- and part conversation-based
game. The conversations are a piece of cake–you never have to replay them even
when you’re redoing parts of the game, and time spent in conversing is not deducted
from the time until your next abduction. The inventory stuff is a different can
of worms. Not only are there red herrings up the yin-yang, but there is that little
time limit factor, and on top of that, you have to deal with the time shift,
all of which come into play in finding what objects you need and how to use
them. And if you screw up even the teensiest weensiest little bit, you have to
replay the same parts over and over again because of the recurring abduction and
getting sent back to Earth aspect. I’m pretty good at adventure games for the
most part and resort to hints usually only once or twice per game, but I had to
get hints about 100 times in this game. I’m not sure I could have even completed
it without the Internet–I suppose I could have in time, but I would have become
bored with all the redoing well before that point. I am going to give the gameplay
a C because I think it was a great idea that fell flat in its execution.

The
graphics were clean and crisp 2D cartoon-style. Let me make a comparison: the
graphics are almost as good as those in the third Monkey Island game,
The Curse of Monkey Island. They were colorful, rich, and not skimpy on
the animation, plus they still look good almost four years later, so I give
them an A.

The music and sound effects were just fine but nothing to
write home about. Most of the voice acting was great, but the actor who played
Wilbur sounded just like Mickey Mouse. The way Wilbur is drawn, I’d expect a voice
more in keeping with that of an older adolescent boy, so it was quite off-putting,
more than once, when his squeaky voice came out of my speakers. On the whole,
though, the voice acting was good, and I give this category a B–nothing
spectacular but certainly nothing obnoxious, either.

I am going to give
Orion Burger the final grade of B+–it’s really quite a nice little
game that deserved wider recognition and distribution, and it tried to do something
a little different. I would recommend that you play it if you can ever obtain
a copy, but on the other hand, don’t feel like you need to go out of your way
for it, either. I do, however, wish Eidos would rerelease it–it would certainly
stand up well in comparison to the adventure games currently being released.

System
Requirements:

PC:System
requirements are not stated on the CD insert, and I got the game without a box.
However, it is a DOS game, so I’d imagine the requirements are fairly low-end.

Macintosh:
68040
or Power Macintosh
8 MB RAM minimum
Not compatible with RAM Doubler
Mouse,
keyboard
Double-speed CD-ROM drive required