GamerCouple's Profile
Stat Summary
- Average Rating:3.9
- Helpful Votes:216
- Reviews Submitted:24
- First Review:April 27, 2012
- Most Recent Review:September 6, 2014
- Featured reviews0
Turn one diner into a promenade of five-star restaurants! Pick the menu, and decorate your restaurant to impress your customers!
Overall rating
5
/
5
2 of 2 found this review helpful
A "dash" game that doesn't force you to micromanage.
PostedAugust 20, 2012
GamerCouple
fromthe living room
Skill Level:Intermediate
Favorite Genre(s):Strategy, Time Management
Current Favorite:
The Palace Builder
(4)Fun Factor
5
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
4
/
5
Level of Challenge
4
/
5
Storyline
4
/
5
This is a great beginners' "dash" style game. You're the manager of a restaurant (the game takes you through several restaurants with varying themes). You hire and train staff, learn recipes and procure the ingredients for them, arrange tables and decorations for guests to enjoy, and equip your kitchen. Every day, you get advance notice of what sorts of ingredients your day's guests will want; you arrange recipes to meet as many of those ingredient preferences as possible. Each restaurant theme gets different dishes; a "family" restaurant gets the hamburgers and shrimp cocktail, while the "Italian" one gets lasagna.
But unlike other "dash" games, you're not forced to sit there and cook every single dish. Once you buy the ingredients for dishes once, you're done for the whole level. Discovering recipes are mini-games in themselves; people who already know how to cook will be at the advantage here since ingredients are pretty much what they are in real life. Nor must you direct each waiter and chef as they go about their duties. Once you've bought your furniture and decorations, once you've trained your staff, once you've decided what your menu is for the day, you set it up to go and then sit back and watch. All you do during the actual day is decide where to seat the customers who come into the restaurant.
As you advance through training and building up your restaurant, you get more "stars," which unlock more objects. The better trained your staff, the happier guests will be and the faster they'll be served and out the door to clear up table space--and the more money they tip. It's all very neatly interconnected.
If you like "dash" games but don't care for the micro-management aspects of them, or if you've never played a "dash" game and want to try one, you may like this game.
I recommend this game!
Guide a tribe of castaways as they live, breed, and discover secrets about their mysterious home in this real-time Sim game!
Overall rating
4
/
5
7 of 8 found this review helpful
Very charming casual game.
PostedAugust 7, 2012
GamerCouple
fromthe living room
Skill Level:Intermediate
Favorite Genre(s):Adventure, Large File, Strategy, Time Management
Current Favorite:
The Palace Builder
(4)Fun Factor
4
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
4
/
5
Level of Challenge
5
/
5
Storyline
5
/
5
Though far more limited than a full-scale citybuilder, this is a cute, harmless, charming little game that has extensive play value. I've got it on my phone and on my computer; I don't normally let it run when I'm not there to "supervise," but a lot of people like that functionality so yes, it does have it, and yes, it lets you pause upon quitting if you don't care for it. The puzzles were crazy difficult for me without assistance, but they weren't the primary draw for me. For me, the fun was in directing my little villagers around the little village in their little lives. It's entrancing in the best sense of the word. It compares very favorably to Gemini Lost, though it's more grown-up looking.
It also has lovely music and a storyline that I found gripping and engaging. And its various interactive bits--crabs, frogs, plant life, etc--is presented as just part of the landscape, meaning that there were things I discovered about the island even well into the game. This genuinely is my favorite entry in the VV series.
I recommend this game!
Gemini Lost
A strange light leads your group to an unfamiliar world! Build a new society, while searching for a way back home!
Overall rating
5
/
5
3 of 4 found this review helpful
Terribly cute little village simulator
PostedJuly 3, 2012
GamerCouple
fromthe living room
Skill Level:Intermediate
Favorite Genre(s):Strategy, Time Management
Fun Factor
5
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
5
/
5
Level of Challenge
4
/
5
Storyline
4
/
5
A group of people find themselves stuck in a strange mountain valley and must do their best to acquire resources and live long enough to figure out how to get home. If you like Virtual Villagers' Tree of Life, you will probably like this a lot. It's very similar in its division of labor between adults and children, but adds a few quirks like matching villagers by horoscope sign. The graphics in Gemini are better, Gemini explains its concepts better, and it gives you a lot more to do, so I judge this the superior game. I liked how quick it was to learn. Some things are a challenge to figure out unaided, but mostly it's just an adorable Robinson-Crusoe type of simulator. Gameplay is smooth, there's a feeling of progression throughout the game, and it's consistent with other games of its genre. Plus, it's really cute.
I recommend this game!
Become the manager of some of the world`s leading beach resorts in Paradise Beach, a fun and exciting Strategy game!
Overall rating
4
/
5
10 of 10 found this review helpful
Very cute time management game.
PostedApril 27, 2012
GamerCouple
fromthe living room
Skill Level:Intermediate
Favorite Genre(s):Arcade & Action, Strategy, Time Management
Fun Factor
4
/
5
Visual/Sound Quality
5
/
5
Level of Challenge
4
/
5
Storyline
4
/
5
In this game the player takes on the role of builder/manager of varying sizes of beach parks. The storyline is simplistic but effective, getting the player into the action without bogging down the fun of making the park's various attractions. There are a number of set islands and each island has a series of quests that must be finished to progress any further. If you finish on time, like in a lot of TMGs, you get a gold star--yay! But that gold star seems to exist more for your benefit than to advance any aspect of gameplay, alas.
By far this game's strongest suit is the simply adorable graphics. Hours into play, I was still delighted by them. The music isn't distracting but adds nicely to the ambience. The play itself is smooth and quirk-free, and the initial tutorials get the points across very quickly. This is not a difficult game to learn. The bonus level is especially cute and imaginative and worth the time investment to get to.
About the only thing that especially irked me about this game was that its sandbox mode does not allow full use of the park attractions. The sandbox mode for the first island, for example, only allows the stuff you could build in the first set of scenarios. If you want, say, a jet-ski rental shop anywhere but on the last island, you're out of luck.
Another weak point to the game was the total lack of support for de-select keystrokes. A simple snip of code to allow right-clicking or the Esc key to de-select stuff would be wonderful, but for some reason this game doesn't allow for that. It doesn't ruin the game for me, but it's certainly off-putting and hard to get used to after decades of games allowing this simple functionality.
The replay value of the game isn't humongous, especially since only one island allows full sandbox mode, but it's really really cute and I don't regret buying it at all. I liked it a lot.
I recommend this game!