[arcade sounds]
[typing]
[pew-pew sounds]
[MIDI rock music]
Oh, yeah. Time to get thirsty. 'Cause it's Tapper,
developed by Marvin Glass and Associates and released by Bally Midway to arcades in 1983.
And, man, does this have a classy looking cabinet.
Just look at the design of this thing.
It looks like a bar.
It's even got spots on the side to set your beer mug.
The control panel is a bit different as well,
with a tap-shaped joystick that moves down to pour beers
and a four-way joystick to control your character.
In Tapper, you play a bartender,
with a sweet mustache,
and he probably needs to buy some more mustache wax.
So you have to help him tend the bar and get paid.
Move to a tap, fill the mug and toss it down to the next patron
before they reach the end of the bar.
And these are some seriously impatient punks
that will keep encroaching on your personal space
if you don't get 'em drunk quickly enough.
So if they do reach you, they'll drag you down to the other end of the bar and kill you.
Good grief, what a way to lose a life.
But thankfully, your dude's got lightning-fast moves,
at least when moving up and down.
He seemingly runs under the influence of ether when moving left to right, though,
so it's a bit of a risk vs. reward thing when collecting tips and empty mugs.
You also have to worry about the lovely ladies at the top of the screen,
because any time they show up,
one or more of your intolerably-violent patrons
will forget they want alcohol and take a nice look at those sweet gams up on stage.
So if you toss a beer down to no one, it breaks
and you lose a life,
as well as gain the eternal shame of having wasted beer.
It's a tough but highly rewarding little game to play as is,
but the story does not end there.
Seeing as the game was all about serving alcohol
and included in-game branding by none other than Budweiser,
it's not too surprising that there were some people up in arms about the game
supposedly marketing alcohol to kids.
This was stupid, but whatever.
Bally Midway released an altered version of the game in 1984
called Root Beer Tapper,
which got rid of all the beer references
and turned the bartender into a classic soda jerk.
It also made the game make even less logical sense than it did to begin with.
I mean, what kind of Old West saloon carried root beer, much less on tap?
Okay, maybe it's sarsaparilla, and maybe this is just a themed bar.
Better to just not think about it.
Something TO think about is the game's home conversions,
and in this review we'll be looking at three of them:
the Atari 2600,
the IBM PC and the Apple II.
First up is the Atari 2600 VCS release,
converted by Beck Tech and published by Sega in 1984.
Now, you might be thinking, okay,
how can they possibly have hoped to translate an arcade game like Tapper to a machine
with a 1.19 MHz CPU and 128 bytes of RAM?
Well, as you can see, they not only hoped, but they pulled it off quite well,
all things considered.
Obviously, the game is a bit freaking ugly and minimalistic as nuts,
but the gameplay is solid and still feels very much like you're playing Tapper.
It's even got some music, and the bonus round,
where that dick is swapping around all the cans of root beer,
which is pretty impressive.
Er, well, it's Mountain Dew now,
but at least they didn't call it Mountain Dew Tapper,
because somehow that sounds even more ridiculous than Root Beer Tapper.
About the only things missing are the fact that no tips show up at the end of bars
and the girls don't show up to distract anyone,
and only appear at the end of the round when no one cares.
So it's not the most complete version of the game,
but it's certainly more than playable, and I quite like it.
And this is actually not the easiest of 2600 games to find either,
so if you do come across it for a good price,
grab it, even if you don't care much for this version.
Although, if you're looking for it online,
be sure to keep an eye out for misspellings,
because due to the font used, some who aren't familiar with the game
refer to it as "Fapper."
Which would be a very different game indeed, so let's not go there.
Next is the IBM PC booter version,
developed by Sierra On-Line in 1983.
As you might expect for an arcade conversion on the PC of the time,
the graphics and sound are pretty lackluster CGA and PC speaker affairs.
Now, there actually is a way to get some better graphics
if you had a composite CRT display,
but I wasn't able to capture footage of this version
since apparently my disk didn't come with it, so yeah.
Thankfully, the gameplay is pretty much untouched from the arcade original.
The tips are there,
the distracting showgirls are there,
the bonus round is there,
which makes apparent that it's still Intellivision- murdering Mountain Dew for some reason.
Though the cans move around entirely too fast
and in such a way that it makes it very difficult to keep up with,
far more so than the arcade game, so that kind of sucks.
But for 1983 on the PC, this is actually pretty impressive,
although just looking at the awful color scheme, you probably can't tell.
But the controls and gameplay are spot-on,
and it really does feel like you're playing the arcade game,
just with graphics that are slightly less appealing than mucus,
so props to those who put this version of the game together.
And lastly, we have the Apple II version,
developed and published by Sega in 1984.
And I am sad to report that this is the weakest version of the game I've played,
at least in this set of conversions we're looking at here.
Granted that it is impressive that a computer from 1977
can pull off the graphics and sound well enough to be instantly recognizable.
But the problem is with the gameplay itself,
and even the Atari 2600 pulls it off better than this one.
Basically, there's a bit of a delay between button presses and actions,
and sometimes you think you didn't fully press a direction or pour a beer,
and end up doing it again only to see that you did it both times.
And you've screwed up everything.
I just could not get used to playing this,
even after a good 15 to 20 minutes with it
because I kept feeling like the controls were fighting against me.
Ah, well, at least the Mountain Dew logo looks nice,
and you can actually keep up wth the cans a bit more than the IBM PC version.
It's just this Apple II game could have really benefited from a bit more polish in the controls department,
and seeing as arcade games like this are all about the gameplay,
that's more than enough reason to just pass this one by.
But that's just the Apple II version,
as there are plenty of other versions out there that are fantastic to play,
including, of course, the arcade original most of all.
If you do ever see the cabinet for Budweiser Tapper or Root Beer Tapper,
or one of the plentiful home computer and console conversions,
I'd say it's well worth stopping to give it a go.
'Cause it's Tapper
and, man, I am thirsty.
I am... going to drink things.
[bottle cap falls, drink pouring]
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