Who’d want to gobble giant burgers after your hyperactive chef’s stomped all over the fixings is a mystery, but the dude’s too busy dodging angry pickles and frankfurters to worry about profit. Scurry across a man-sized slab of meat or cheese, and it’ll fall onto the layer beneath. The result is a minor culinary avalanche that scores points and contributes to your burger quota for each of 40 levels.

The fast-paced simplicity of such a goofy goal made BurgerTime a hit in 1982’s arcades, but World Tour tosses in fresh ingredients with little consideration for the damage they do to gameplay. Levels that rotate add a new sense of depth, but they can also make finding your next burger a pain. Moreover, enemies tend to blend in with the world’s garish colors, and sometimes foes spawn right on top of you, meaning you often die before you even see the danger. Worst of all, questionable collision detection and onscreen movements that lag ever-so-slightly behind your controller movements will make success feel more like luck than skill.

Multiplayer burger-making competitions and maze races facilitated by rocket power-ups are a bit more fun, provided you don’t subject yourself to the character-shrinking effects of a split-screen. But you’re really better off just finding something else on which to snack.

PUBLISHER: MonkeyPaw Games  •  DEVELOPER: Frozen Codebase  •  ESRB: Everyone  •  MULTIPLAYER: 4 on split-screen or Xbox Live  •  ACHIEVEMENTS: Half and half  •  COST: 800 Microsoft Points ($10)

On Xbox Live Arcade

+ Faithful to the original’s basics; tolerable online multiplayer; offbeat humor.

– Far from attractive; easy-to-miss enemies who sometimes spawn on top of you.

– Slightly laggy controls; vengeful collision detection; slippery obstacles.

? Why does it auto-switch to “Easy” if you die too often?

4.5