18. Tapper
Tapper is a 1983 Bally Midway C64 port of the eponymous arcade bar-tending simulation released in the same year. You serve 4 bars worth of unruly patrons who like to drink everything you throw at them and keep coming back for more. While trying to keep your paying customers satisfied, you'll also need to quickly pick up empties thrown back by your barflies before they crash to the floor, and gather tips left on the bar to increase your point total and buy time by allowing your patrons some distraction courtesy of a pair of pixelated go-go dancers. Subsequent levels increase in speed and intensity, with a growing number of customers spawning much closer to you in later rounds and finishing many more drinks than their low-level counterparts before staggering out of the club.
Tapper saw a variety of releases on the Commodore platform through various companies such as Sega, US Gold, and Handic depending on the storage medium being used and region to which the game was being offered. While the game is available in floppy disk, tape, and cart formats, I opted for the latter. This wasn't a great call in that the cart version seems to be lacking 2 of the 4 different bars available to the player on other storage media, though I suppose it saved me some loading time in return.
The overall presentation of Tapper is simple and inviting. The game is somewhat sanitized from the arcade version, with the Budweiser sponsorship of the original replaced with a Mountain Dew-themed bonus round in which you play a shell game with soda cans (the arcade version was also eventually re-tooled with a more kid-friendly "Root Beer Tapper" variant).
The game's graphics offer a serviceable, no-frills presentation typical of early C64 arcade conversions, with a pseudo-3D perspective that comes off as a zoomed-in low-res version of the arcade original. Some of the charming animation flourishes of the original such as the bartender's "flip a mug and break it on his heel" routine are sadly no longer present.
Don't expect great music or sound effects here by any stretch of the imagination - we have "Ol Susanna" in greatly primitive monophonic form, along with a few basic environmental bleeps and bloops here and there. It's not offensive (and isn't too far removed from the quality of its arcade counterpart, to be fair), but you'll probably be more well-suited to mute the speaker and fire up a classic rock album to match the game's drinking-establishment ambiance.
The game supports both single-player and 2-player modes, offers a choice of keyboard or joystick control, and gives you a selection of Beginner, Arcade, and Expert difficulty modes. Arcade mode feels pretty close to Beginner with the exception of a few less lives, while Expert starts you off around the difficulty equivalent of Level 6 or 7 while giving you a 100000 point bonus for your trouble. This Expert bonus was a quirk that I wasn't too fond of, given the considerable difficulty and tedium of racking up 6 figures in the lesser Beginner or Arcade modes.
Though Tapper doesn't provide much (if anything) in the way of depth, it does boast addictive, enjoyable gameplay and a unique premise compared to the mountain of space-shooter carts that marked the early stages of the C64's run. From what I can gather, this is still the best version of Tapper available on an 80s home console, and I'd certainly recommend picking it up for the sake of a few plays over a couple of cold ones with a friend.
Think you have a shot at serving drinks on Hank's level and topping the high score chart? Check out our High Scores page and submit a screenshot to earn your spot in the C128 Hoedown hall of fame!
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