The regular version of Diner Dash 5: Boom! is now available for $6.99. Here is the review of Diner Dash 5: Boom!
The Collector’s Edition includes:
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Can you guess what happens in Diner Dash 5: Boom!? Diner Dash Flo indeed sees her diner go ka-boom! in Flo decides to provide a health conscious menu, so she posts a sign that says, “Fat-Free Breakfast.” Someone removes the “Fat-” on the the sign to show “Free Breakfast.” Naturally, when her diner opens, the whole town rushes in and destroys the diner. The nasty Mr. Big comes in and announces he has a standing contract with the city that any lot that goes unused for a week becomes his.
Hal, a contractor and huge Flo diner fan, offers to help her rebuild her diner within one week. While he gets to work, Flo goes from neighborhood to neighborhood running outdoor diners to help Hal with the rebuilding. As he progresses, he’ll ask you what design and color you want for the diner. The diner you customize will appear near the end of the game.
The game play remains the same in that you fill in as Flo. You’ll take orders, deliver the dishes, clean up, fulfill customer requests for special snacks and fix problems that pop up. You’ll met new customer types as well as some from past Diner Dashes. As usual, customer personalities can drive your strategy. Lawyers and working women have little patience, so you probably want to serve them first in a chain. One customer type takes his time. Librarians and bookworms like the quiet while the working men make a lot of noise talking on their cell phones.
Gain bonus points by matching customers’ colors with the seats and doing a bunch of the same activity in a row (chaining). For example, deliver the check to as many customers as possible ready to check out. The more you chain the same task, the higher your bonus.
For each level, you need to earn a minimum amount to advance. Those who like to challenge themselves can work toward the expert scores. After all, the more money you earn, the more you have for shopping for power ups before starting the next level. Power ups let you speed up activities whether it’s Flo getting around or Cookie cooking faster. But there’s one new type of power up — the kind that’s only good for one level, if you can afford it. You can hire Quinn of Wedding Dash to fill up the salad bar, get another set of hands for carrying things or a hostess to keep the people in line happy.
Oh, that’s right, we have the salad bar element. Sometimes diners choose to go to the salad bar instead of ordering from the menu. You need to drag the salad folks to the salad bar while ensuring the salad bar remains full. If one column of food is empty, the diners can’t move on.
Another new feature is Facebook. Diner Dash 5 can send your game updates to your Facebook page. You don’t have to use the Facebook feature. You can also win virtual gifts that you can give to a Facebook friend. While a cool feature, I didn’t know anyone who is a Diner Dash fan. If you send it to someone who doesn’t have Diner Dash 5, it’s useless.
One big improvement in Diner Dash 5 is that it’s easier. I could never get far in past games because they were very (yes, I am using this modifier) hard. This one, I did. Diner Dash pros — don’t fret… believe me, there are challenges in the game. This game does a great job of easing the challenge while retaining it for advanced players.
I still have problems with chaining at times. I’d be running all over, click, click, click only to find something failed and that failure can mean the difference between standard score and expert score. Plus, snacks break the chain. I don’t think that’s fair.
You get a lot of game value for the time. Once you play through the game, you can replay levels to reach expert scores. As of this time, only the Collector’s Edition is available and it requires a Big Fish Games Club Membership. The regular one — read: cheaper and no extras — will be available later. Extras include:
The extras may or may not be worth it. You can get walkthroughs from forums around the web. You can review the story by going back to previous levels. I rarely change screensavers and wallpapers, so these had no value to me.
FTC disclosure: Review based on expired review copy received from publisher.
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Diner Dash 5: Boom Collector’s Edition blows up today, that is, it’s available for downloading for club members. Diner Dash’s Flo’s Diner is smashed to bits. Flo needs cash to renovate her restaurant within a week or deal with some serious repercussions. So help Flo seat, serve and save the day in the time management game that involves dealing with weird weather conditions in outdoor settings. You can also build a unique diner with 1000 combinations.
Can you believe Flo first captured customers’ stomachs five years ago? “Since the debut of the franchise in 2004, the Diner Dash series has been downloaded more than 550 million times,” says PlayFirst.
Diner Dash 5: Boom Collector’s Edition includes:
Not much information about the game is out there yet as people could not download it until today.
Kenny Shea Dinkin, PlayFirst’s Chief Creative Officer, says the company wanted to ensure the latest edition remains fresh and innovative without feeling like “the same ol’.” So what does PlayFirst do? Blow up the dinner and give players 50 levels of outdoor dining around DinerTown’s neighborhoods. Since her debut five years ago, Flo has found her way on iPhones, Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendeo DS, PlayStation Network and WiiWare. Wowii! Here are some of the Diner Dash games available on Amazon.
If you’d rather save the dough, a standard $6.99 version will come along later.
Mac fans! A Diner Dash 5: Boom Collector’s Edition Mac edition is available.
Download Diner Dash 5: Boom Collector’s Edition for Windows or Diner Dash 5: Boom Collector’s Edition for Mac
FYI: Big Fish Game Club is a monthly membership that lets you get the daily deal game for $2.99, credit every month to redeem for most games on the site and play “Tomorrow’s Game” today. The club costs $6.99 on a monthly basis and you can cancel membership anytime. I had no trouble canceling membership.
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This is the third Farm Frenzy 3. I appreciate the developer for keeping the numbering at three because it shows there’s not much difference in terms of game play. The main difference is the setting, so there’s no misleading anyone claiming it’s a whole new game with enhancements. The series has many fans who are happy to keep playing the same game with new challenges.
Farm Frenzy 3: American Pie: Manage five different farms around the world and try your hand at penguin breeding and jewelry making in Farm Frenzy 3! Enjoy outrageously fun levels, wacky animals and more upgrades than there are ears in a field of corn! Grow crops, feed animals, collect produce and manufacture goods, while you enjoy zany animation! Help Scarlett become the president of the Farmers` Union by earning the votes of the people she helps.
Farm Frenzy 3: Ice Age: Join Scarlett as she leaves sunshine and warm temperatures behind and travels to the North Pole to check out a farm she purchased through a newspaper ad. When she arrives, she not only finds the property in a state of disrepair, she also meets two brothers who could use her help making ice cream. While whipping up chilly treats in 90 levels of frosty fun, you’ll breed and care for penguins and other arctic animals, manufacture new products and enjoy a parade of visual gags. You’ll also meet a surprise guest who will show his appreciation for your hard work in a special way! Who is it?
Here’s the list of all the Farm Frenzys.
Farm Mania 2 is also out. Anna of Farm Mania is back again! This time she is even more enthusiastic, active and full of great ideas! Wanna have your own farm? No problems! Fruits and vegetables, animals and fishes, dairy plant and bakery – you can have it all with in Farm Mania 2! By the way, Anna got married to a strong and charming farmer Bob and now all their dreams are coming true! You can help them!
Playfirst adds another dash game incorporating both Flo of Cooking Dash (and many, many others) and Quinn of Wedding Dash. Quinn sees going into the hotel business as a natural extension of her wedding planning business. Newlyweds need a honeymoon spot, so she finds a run down hotel and works to revamp it with Flo’s help.
Like a typical dash game, Hotel Dash: Suite Success includes five hotels with ten levels each in its story mode. Lots of upgrades, of course, are available so you can renovate the hotels and the rooms raising their star level from zero to three stars. You collect stars when customers leave the room happy. If the room has two stars, you get two stars every time a customer leaves. In other words, if occupy a two-star room twice, you’ll earn four stars that go toward decorating the VIP rooms that exist in every hotel. The opportunity to redecorate the VIP rooms comes at the end of a level.
To pass a level, you need to reach the money goal for that level. If you reach the next higher score, you can earn expert. The game also rewards you with trophies, which you can upload to Playfirst to add to your account. A standard round consists of Flo delivering the baggage to the rooms, providing room service, dropping off extra towels or pillows, taking food to dogs and setting out the newspaper in the sitting area for impatient customers.
Guests come with single-color outfits. If you match them with the color on the door, you get bonus bucks. To reach the guests rooms, everyone takes the elevators and Flo is first in line. She starts out carrying the suitcases herself, but she can upgrade to carts so she could eventually carry up to six bags in one set. It gets frenzied when you have Flo riding the elevator to get where she needs to go and sometimes she has to take two elevators. After a while, you become used to it and figure out the different customer preferences.
Hotel Dash: Suite Success customers have unique traits. One brings a dog, another brings six bags (!!), the honeymooners ask for pillows, the lumberjack-looking dudes always request room service twice, the celebrity whose bodyguards block the hallway and so on. Their tolerance for patience also varies. The professional woman has little patience while the bookworm has more patience. Clowns are very clumsy that Flo needs to be ready to come after them with a mop.
In the midst of the frenzy, Quinn needs to put out fires just like she did in Wedding Dash. Someone tries to sabotage the hotel by turning off the electricity. Quinn has little to in the game, it would be nice if she could help more. We know she’s an strong gal who can handle herself.
Some people won’t feel challenged in Hotel Dash: Suite Success as it’s one of the easier games in the dash series. You can’t help but want to complete the story mode. Those who like endless mode will be challenged plenty. I never play those as they don’t sit well with my stomach, but expert players will appreciate the challenge.
The biggest irritation was the game crashing. I have a newish laptop with a good graphics card. Nonetheless, the graphics are worth it as they’re the same high quality cartoon style most of us love in Playfirst games. And of course, the story has humor and comes together nicely, for the most part.
FTC Discalimer: Copy received from publisher.
Despite the “3″ in the name, Farm Frenzy 3 is the fourth game in the Farm Frenzy series. Farm Frenzy Pizza Party wasn’t worthy of a number despite its success. Anyhoo, Farm Frenzy 3 brings more of the same while adding international locations and heavy-duty graphics that slow down the game’s performance.
In the latest incarnation, you take care of animals, store the goods, produce other goods and sell them. Cows, chickens and ostriches make it back in this one as do the bears and dogs. This one adds llamas, yaks, penguins and walruses. The international part comes in when Scarlett travels to Africa and other faraway locations to help with the farms as a step toward her goal of becoming president of the farmers union.
Scarlett has different goals to meet for every level. The goal could be earning a set amount of cash, collecting X amount of products or making X amount of products. Sometimes you have one goal and sometimes four. Anything goes.
She also has to buy and upgrade equipment for managing her farm including transportation, product making machines and defenses like cages to trap the bears. Many of the levels require you have certain upgrades before you can play them, so you’ll have to play other levels or replay them until you collect enough cash to upgrade.
The strategy and planning aspect of Farm Frenzy 3 remains one of its strengths. You can’t always play the next level and you’ll have to experiment with different strategies to earn the gold or silver star. This approach prevents boredom and predictability while boosting replayability.
One of the flaws in the game is the graphics. Oh, they’re gorgeous, but too much for the game’s performance. When clicking bears to cage them, the game jerks and the graphics flake. This happens too often. I’ll take performance over graphics every time.
Farm Frenzy 3 has a couple of strange features. For one, the dogs that keep the bears away from the animals now roll off the screen with the bears. I like that the bear gets out of my way instead of just stands there while the dog barks. But the way the dog rolls off freaks you out. The other problem is the African farmer who looks like an inappropriate stereotype. I appreciate the developers try to reflect the African culture — but it’s not the best representation of Africans.
Despite the performance issues, Farm Frenzy 3 keeps you hopping and never bores. The game comes with 95 levels, 30 animals of which 5 are the enemies, and 33 products to produce. Because of its diversity in game play, animals and scenes, you’re more willing to try reaching for the gold though it means replaying levels many times.
Ready for some sweet-smelling success? You can do it by running a perfume business in Passport to Perfume, and without driving the nose crazy in sniffing the different perfumes and colognes. OK, OK, I’ll cut it out with the scent talk.
Picture this: It’s the 1940s and a young woman, Sophia, we learn about her father’s accidental death from years before. She runs her own perfume shop when a package arrives containing her father’s diary. The diary reveals ingredients and where to find them in order to create Marie Antoinette’s fragrance.
The diary inspires Sophia to grow her shop and travel in between to search for various ingredients to recreate the special fragrance and others. She makes and sells perfumes in three locales stocking her selves with different shaped bottles with different colors and features.
Every couple of time management scenes, she takes off for various countries to track down special ingredients. These scenes switch to hidden object game mode where Sophia looks for hidden ingredients to use in her fragrances. After collecting the ingredients and new bottles, she can create new fragrances.
When she returns to her store, she needs to refill her stock as needed and buy upgrades. She can upgrade her store to add decor to bring in more customers and compel them to be more patient. Other upgrades allow her to speed the machines.
You play the Passport to Perfume store scenes in time management style, fulfilling customer orders. These scenes can turn wild and frenzied as customers request specific features making it all too easy to mess up an order. The difficulty level may be too easy for experienced players, but still challenge them in terms of trying to get the orders right. Or they can skip story mode and try the more challenging game play in endless mode.
The hidden object game play feels repetitive and tedious to find these ingredients using a brush and shovel. The hidden objects take little effort to find with the eyes, but a lot of mouse work in dealing with the tools to reveal ingredients and bottles hiding behind leaves and dirt. The ingredient part, even the entire game, would be more fun had it “copied” the Chocolatier formula.
The machines might drive you crazy. You can click the machines to send Sophia to the machine, but then nothing happens. You must press the button to activate the machine. Very annoying. The whole thing should work as one. The graphics disappoint. They just don’t measure up to the standards set in other time management games.
Passport to Perfume serves up a neat theme that some will find everything rosy. Give it a try and download Passport to Perfume.
Trouble on the set! Flo’s friend Gilda needs help feeding the cast and crew of her TV show. You prepare, cook, assemble and serve the delicious menu items from each TV-themed restaurant. Watch for celebrities, but beware of the short-tempered director who will make sure everyone gets back to work quickly! Can you successfully feed the egos and stomachs of the cast and crew before they walk off the set?
Sounds like Food Network’s “Who will be the next Food Network Star” Diner Dash style. I look forward to trying this out as I’ve been on a Food Network and Travel Network kick lately. Plus, I loved the original Cooking Dash.
Download Cooking Dash – DinerTown Studios to give it a try.
Not another great game coming out!? Looks like we’re going through a “busy” period of casual games in which many and high quality games are hitting the wires. Build-a-lot 4: Power Source takes on a “greening” theme, which makes it similar to Plan It Green. I’ll be interested in seeing the similarities and differences. Anyone play both yet?
You’ll have technicians working for you to convert homes into more energy efficient ones and add recreational facilities to neighborhoods.
Check out the review of Build-a-lot 3: Passport to Europe.
Download the game from your favorite site
Love. Quirky family members. Wedding crashers. Beautiful brides. Bridezillas. Groom kongs. Who doesn’t love a wedding even with all of its craziness? Quinn returns in Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love! for a third helping as a wedding planner who happily serves her clients in this blissful (most of the time) time management series.
She is planning the biggest wedding of her life — her own to Joe, the photographer. One hitch: he doesn’t know about it! An opening came up in a hot spot and it was either grab it in six weeks or wait years. She asks cupid for help, but he has a backlog of his own. If she helps him through his backlog, he’ll help her with her situation.
Like the previous games, your job is to seat guests and keep them happy or else face Bridezilla and Groom Kong. Of course, Quinn has a few tricks for managing manage guests when the food doesn’t get to them fast enough. She has cocktail tables and bells that bring out the cherubs.
She holds weddings in interesting locales beginning with an aquarium followed by a barn and two others. The game receives a few new features to make it the best one in the series. The cherubs can add one or two hands in helping Flo carry food and gifts, but they’re upgrades.
Before you start the reception, you have to figure out what the couple wants. In the past, you picked the three things that best meets their requests. in Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love!, you also have to watch the budget and it’s possible to have several right answers. This is more enjoyable although it turns challenging in the later levels.
Guests may request champagne, the microphone to share a special message to the new couple, a song request or seating change. These give you bonus opportunities as well as chaining (doing the same actions in a row). Of course, Quinn has to deal with disasters ranging from over-celebrating bridesmaids and birds at the table to falling gifts and a missing dog.
The guests have personality traits to vary the pace. Some eat fast, others eat slow, one eats two of every course and one forgets to eat. While all of this sounds overwhelming, the game introduces new guests and features over time rather than all at once. The challenge level also slowly works from easy to tough.
Every venue comes with one cupid mini-game. Cute, but kind of pointless except to earn more coin. Cupid needs to shoot one man and one woman to match the given couple. Not only do you control the location of the arrow, but the strength of the shot.
As expected of Dash games, the game tells a great and fun story without overloading or confusing you. Two modes come in this one: adventure and endless. Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love! has the honor of being my favorite of the Dash series. Diner Dash is simply too hard and the customers are bland compared to Wedding Dash’s.
PlayFirst knows how to put on a great wedding and succeeds again with Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love!
Download Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love!.
