The golden age of the video game was the late 70's to the mid 80's. From this brief span of years, thousands of video games were produced, a great many of them innovative and cutting edge. It's easy to look back on Pac Man and laugh at it's primitive graphics and sounds while we're playing our 3D graphic card accelerated dual processor Doom 3 - but they really were quite the thing back in their day.

So, with an artifact of popular culture so massive, it's understandable that it will splash over into other aspects. Thus, we got TV shows based on video games, breakfast cereal based on video games, pop songs based on video games - and of course the topic of our current discussion today: board games.

The most popular video games had analog equivalents - Donkey Kong and Pac Man, the two 800 pound gorillas of the video game industry at the time. But sensing an opportunity to jump on the merchandising band wagon, other titles were licensed too. Of the second tier of games was one that I plunked many a quarter into back in the day: Berzerk.

The basic premise was pretty simple - you, a human, were trapped in a simple maze of electrified walls. The other inhabitants of the maze were robots bent on, to steal a phrase from Doctor Who, your final extermination. Overseeing this world of robots was Evil Otto, a bouncing smiley face who chased you relentlessly if you lingered too long in the maze. On and on you would run until eventually the robots got you. Like I said - simple, but fun (with the added benefit of being the first game that featured speech. Sure it was simple robotic speech - but then, you WERE fighting robots after all.)

So, how does it translate into a board game?
While Milton Bradley can be real hit-or-miss with their video game adaptations, this one isn’t so bad. The maze is of course static, unlike the 20 or so wall variations that you would face in the video game. The human player starts on one side of the board (in more or less the King position, if this were chess), Otto directly across on the other. Dotting the board in various positions are 6 robots. The robots must land on the human to EX-TER-MIN-ATE, and the human only has to land next to them to blow them off the board. If the human kills 4 robots and gets off the far side of the board he wins the round (bonus points for killing more robots). If the robots kill him 3 times, the round ends. Four rounds later, the play with the most points wins.

Not exactly a very deep concept. It is however, kind of fun for a brief distraction. Sure there's not a lot of tactics involved, but there is a bit of strategy needed. Do you clump all your robots together hoping for a lucky strike, or do you spread out. Do you fall back and protect the exit? Do you sacrifice the two robots necessary to spawn Evil Otto (a much more powerful piece). In short, despite its kind of cheesy nature and forced video game tie in, Berzerk is kind of fun. And considering some of the other painful video game adaptations out there, you could do much worse.

That’s nice - but how's it look?
Well, it looks like the 80's. There's really no other way to describe the box and board art. They did change Evil Otto from a "Have a nice Day" happy face that tries to kill you to a large, butch WWF wrestler (which, being the 80's, strangely appropriate), complete with studded collar, big biker gloves and bizarre face mask. On second thought, he's more of a big butch member of the Village People than a wrestler. The robots look like they've wandered off the set of Krull, and the human has no arm until you "deploy" them by pushing a button on his back. The board is colorful and garish, managing to invoke the spirit of a video game arcade. Like I said - it's the 80's in cardboard format.

Whats the target demographic?
Great for the 10 and under crowd - pretty simple mechanics, and not a huge time sink (3 or so games, while we got to learn the rules took me an hour - more realistically, 10 minuets should be enough), so the short attention spans should have no problem. A must for the retro video game geek. For the rest of us, well its a fun time wasting diversion, but it's two player gameplay means not much in the way of a party game. Best for mano-a-mano sessions.

Anything else I should know?
Optional house rule - robots must say "GOT THE HU-MAN-OID!" when exterminating the human, or say "CHICK-EN, FIGHT LIKE A RO-BOT!" when they get away. That should complete the video game feel.