A Retro Gamer’s 12 Days Of Christmas: The Eighth Day, Root Beer Tapper

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love sent to me, eight maids a-milking

I am a big believer in the idea that happiness is created through experiences. I’ve heard that many good experiences can occur if you go out into nature but that requires skills like being coordinated and having good cardio which to me seems like it would take a lot of unhappiness to finally get to the happiness. Thankfully, technology has enabled the clumsy and wheezy to have simulated experiences and still manage to find some happiness.

While technology has gifted us with virtual experiences like The Sims, American Truck Simulator, and the beautiful mindfuck that is The Stanley Parable, it has yet to grace us with an adequate barnyard experience. Goat Simulator comes close but you really do not want to try and milk a goat, trust me. You would think that experience would be available in game as DLC but no.

The lyric eight maids a-milking tries to romanticize domestic servitude but no matter how you put it, milking anything does not sound like the first step toward happiness. When I think of happiness, I think of going to a place where everybody knows your name and the bar maids are flirty. It’s time to play Root Beer Tapper.

Initially created as an arcade marketing ploy for Budweiser, Tapper puts you in the sensible shoes of a bartender who must keep the suds flowing to customers across four different bars. In order to not corrupt the youth of our world, the name was changed to Root Beer Tapper and then was ported to several home consoles and PCs. Game play and sound varies wildly which is why I recommend the Colecovision port. L’Chaim!

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