Posts
Friday, October 17, 2008
Cake Shop
Cake Shop, a time management game from Elefun. You are Emily, a recent college graduate. An underwhelming cover letter lands you a job managing a cafe.Customers come in and their menu choices are displayed in a chat bubble. You'll prepare a layer cake, with one of three cakes, a filling (jelly?!), and another cake on top. Depending on your upgrades available in the shop, they may also order something else. Left-clicking on the item selects it; right clicking sends it to the customer. You can also click on the customer to send the item to them. Each customer starts out with a smiley face surrounded by a green timer. As they wait, the timer ticks away. Once the timer makes a round, the tip level decreases.
Each level is about 2 minutes.
Upgrades, called "fittings" are unlocked by a combination of available money and amount of tips earned. Upgrades include a coffee and a cappuccino machine; a cotton candy machine; three soda machines (cola, orange, and fresh, whatever the heck that flavor is - Fresca, perhaps?); three ice creams: strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla; two popcorns: sweet and salty; and three creams: peach, forest fruit (again, any idea what flavor that is?), and chocolate. The player must balance spending money for the fittings and towards building a house. As Emily gets depressed, building the house pumps up her attitude. The better her attitude, the more patience the customers have.
The trick is to make sure you keep all the upgrades filled.
What they did well: Towards the end, it did get difficult to manage all of the upgrades. Having the house building impact her attitude was a different and interesting take. It was easy to see the patience level of the customer and how much time you had left to serve them to get the best tip.
What could've been better: Overlooking the weak story design (why would a college graduate fly somewhere to manage a cake shop?) and weird character movements (really, just drag the image across a screen and have her flip her hand out for a taxi), Cake Shop was mostly just a time-waster. I didn't get any rewards out of playing it. Graphics were very low end and the music was repetitive. Speaking of repetitive, how about having to click through the same dialogue any time I wanted build something on the house? Additionally, it would make more sense for her attitude to make her a slower waitress, rather than affecting the patience levels of the customer. I encountered a pretty major bug when deleting a name. The screen and computer freeze. Behind the full-screen game is a Windows text box, asking if I am sure I want to delete that file. Once you click OK, you can go back to the game or close the game.
Overall, if this had been designed by a set of first year game students, it would be passable. Since it's not, I'd only recommend it for kids, who might not notice all the glaring issues.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment