Have you ever finished a great meal at a nice restaurant and thought, "you know, there's nothing more I'd like to do right now than a joint like this?" Me neither. And yet Kairosoft has the audacity to bring us The Sushi Spinnery... a game that has us slaving away in the role of the world's next great sushi master. Am I just bitter because this thing has me addicted!? Maybe.
Regardless of whether or not you're a fan of cooking, I think we can all agree that good food is awesome. Were such a thing not true, channels like The Food Network would cease to exist, and we'd stop fawning over celebrity chefs. Oh, and Zynga probably wouldn't have announced a game called ChefVille at their Unleashed event. But they did, so I've now proven with horrible, disjointed logic that we all love food.
Picking up where Cooking Academy 2: World Cuisine left off, Cooking Academy 3: Recipe for Success sees our hero returning to their roots at the Cooking Academy after having won 1 million dollars in the Annual World Culinary Workshop. Your new goal is to create a cookbook filled with the best recipes the world has to offer, and you'll need the help of the academy's many skilled chefs to do just that. It's just unfortunate that the gameplay hasn't picked up much originality along the way.
Another Kairosoft release, another weekend lost to the management game genre. Cafeteria Nipponica takes the developer's tried and tested formula to the food and drink sector, as players build a restaurant empire that starts on the outskirts of the big city, and eventually expands to the hustle and bustle of modern life.
Kairosoft has just leaked a message through the website kairopark.jp. "According to a well-informed source, a hot new app is bound for release soon... How about passing on the word via Twitter and other social media?" That hot new app? A restaurant simulation called Cafeteria Nipponica.
A lot of North American gamers were pretty disappointed when it was revealed that Adventure Bar of Wonderland Portable wasn't going to get a PlayStation Store release outside of Japan. Pretty much out of nowhere, though, the game was announced for iOS, under the new title of Adventure Bar Story. Even though the game's got a lot of people interested in its combination of RPG and restaurant management gameplay, the iOS port never quite comes together to create a truly great experience.
Last summer, Adventure Bar of Wonderland Portable came to Japan's PlayStation Store and snagged a lot of attention because of its premise — a 16-Bit title that blended full-on restaurant management gameplay with turn-based RPG battling/exploration. While PSP players in the West haven't received a localized version yet, the game is about to be released over here for iOS under the new title Adventure Bar Story. TouchArcade got to spend some hands-on time with recent build of the game, and it honestly sounds like it'll blend all your favorite things about JRPGs and management sims.
The once booming restaurant management genre has returned to Facebook with Diner Life. A game that tasks you with running a personalized diner out in the middle of the American desert, it's a simplistic title that is standard at best. Offering little that truly stands out, it marks yet another rehashing of the a well-worn formual, but done in a style that feels stiff and ridged with little semblance of a hook for new players.