Wacky Waiters

The Good
In Wacky Waiters, your object is to deliver drinks to the thirsty customer waiting for you on the other side of the screen. The drinks are located above you, and once you get to the customer, one of the drinks will flash. That is the drink you need to get back to him. To get to him, you need to take elevators and negotiate the green platforms carefully in order to do so. One wrong move and you fall down the shaft. Take too long and you are fired. If you manage to have the drink delivered, you get paid.

As far as the game’s front cover is concerned, the appearance of the title is large and is reminiscent to the one in Mikie, which wasn’t available on the VIC. The waiter holding the drinks is well designed, and the look on his face is hilarious. The cassette label itself looks good, with the company logo and the title beside it. It reminds me of how Ocean’s labels looked like.

I was annoyed at the way I kept falling down the elevator shafts because I didn’t know that you have to line yourself up exactly with the elevator before stepping in. I feel that players who are just new to this game will experience the same thing, but getting to the other side is easy once you get the hang of it.

The Bad
Up the top, you have a five-digit score/pay indicator, followed by another two digits, both of which are separated by a colon. I thought that the latter indicates how many lives you have. But no, lose one life and the game is over. Having said that, Wacky Waiters has a stupid scoring system. If you manage to make a perfect delivery, these same two digits will go up rather than your actual score.

The Bottom Line
Wacky Waiters is an average game from Imagine Software, who initially created games for the VIC-20 but moved onto other platforms later. The object is to deliver drinks to thirsty customers while negotiating elevators and platforms. The downsides to this game are the scoring system, as well as the fact that you only get one life. Regardless, if you like doing this stuff in games, don't let these get in your way.