The following games will be discounted next week on Game du Jour, the ‘one-deal-a-day’ website dedicated to indie and casual games:

Mon. Sep 8th: 50% off on Deep Voyage

Tue. Sep 9th: 50% off on Crumb

Wed. Sep 10th: 70% off on Joystick Johnny

Thu. Sep 11th: 40% off on The Race

Fri. Sep 12th: 40% off on Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year

Sat. Sep 13th: 50% off on Safari Sketch

Sun. Sep 14th: 50% off on Purebreaker 3 – Deluxe

Go-Go Gourmet returns reality TV-style as Ginger heads for an international competition against fellow chefs from seven countries in Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year. We learn the story through the usual comic strip style images with dialog bubbles. Most of us will never participate in the Olympics, but this gives us a little taste of it as Ginger represents USA.

Unlike the typical time management game, we do more than just fulfill orders (judges’ orders instead of customer orders). We must hunt for the needed ingredients, use appliances, cook or bake the food, and deliver the pretty dish to the judges.

Judges’ faces pop up on the screen with their dish requests. The ingredients and instructions appear below the judge’s face so you can cook up a storm. Now, you may juggle two, three, or even four orders at once. While the blender runs for one dish, you might put together another dish and throw it in the oven.

Chefs earn points for their work and mini-games provide opportunities to gain more points. The compare scenes game contains ingredients while the other scene is barren. The ingredients appear on the bottom of the screen for your placing into the barren scene to make it match the other scene. The game is stubborn about accepting the first ingredient. Things improve after the game wakes up.

Another mini-game has players hunting as many of the same ingredients as they can and fast. For example, find all of the onions in the kitchen before time’s up. Succeed to win more points and get ahead of the competition.

On occasion, a judge offers a bribe… well, not officially. But if you serve the dish fast enough, you earn bonuses such as time freeze, which stops the clock for a short time. The faster you serve a dish, the higher you score with ten points being the highest possible score. Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year offers hints by showing you the location of the ingredients for a few moments.

As Ginger wins rounds, she also gets new outfits that give her an edge whether it’s making the judges more patient, helping her move faster, or earning bonus points for dishes. She also picks up souvenirs and recipes you can print and try.

Upon completing all the rounds for the country, Ginger travels to the next one where the scene reflects the country’s food and culture. Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year gets harder as you advance to a new country.

The opening story has a typo as sauté turns into saut and the scenes move too slowly with the constant opening and closing of the curtains. Clicks don’t always take forcing players to repeatedly click until Ginger gets moving toward the clicked ingredient. The problematic clicks can make the difference between coming in first place and finishing third. Because of the clicking issue, the game looses half of a star.

Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year demands a lot of fast clicking and moving. Fingers will get a workout. Nonetheless, the game will please fans of the addicting original with its added components, recipe and ingredient variety, and challenge of competing with other chefs rather than just a race against the clock.

Download Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year

Chefs, start your engines! Go Go Gourmet takes you on a culinary trip. Begin as a junior cook and sauté your way up to master chef. Once I get the hang of game, I instantly gain a hearty appetite for the game. Folks, this does not resemble any food game you’ve played. Sure, it has a little Cooking Mama in it, but Go Go Gourmet goes goes beyond the goals of cooking up goodies and fast.

Grandpa Henry hands over his restaurant to Ginger to do with as she pleases. The catch: Grandpa’s restaurant needs a lot of work. Well, hey, it doesn’t cost us anything to get a restaurant. So Ginger (us players) goes to work for Chuck Bergerman (har har, nice pun, designers) to earn money to revamp Grandpa’s restaurant as well as learn her way around the kitchen.

Here, we don’t just run around the kitchen and fulfill customer orders. A level starts with a customer’s face popping up along with a cartoon bubble that lists all the steps and ingredients in the requested dish. A step typically consists of the ingredients to find and ends with cooking the collected ingredients or delivering the dish to the customer.

In every level, the ingredients move around the kitchen. As we work in new restaurants, the kitchen set up also changes. The stove might be on the right in one restaurant and on the left in another. So don’t get too comfy. Impossible to get bored!

You get a feel for where some ingredients will appear, so it’s not as difficult as it sounds. As you cook more recipes, you earn new recipes and ingredients. The kitchen looks barren early in the game and overflows with ingredients later on.

Before you tackle the second or third step with your first customer, customer #2 pops in. Now we must manage two orders at the same time. Be ready to manage up to four customer orders. Sounds frantic, but it’s so much fun.

Don’t expect fake recipes here. The recipes for the dishes look authentic and come to life with a photo as you deliver them to customers. As we gain experience, we move to another restaurant serving different type of food. Ginger learns Pan-Asian, vegetarian, Parisian, seafood, English cooking.

A mini-game comes in every handful of levels. One mini-game calls for catching flying items, another requires you to find ingredients as fast as you can… in the dark. These fit the game nicely and involve memorizing anything like many mini-games tend to do.

As you successfully deliver customer orders, you receive tips. Those tips go toward remodeling Grandpa’s restaurant. On occasion, Ginger hears from, but he doesn’t hear so well during the phone calls. The story moves along smoothly between levels as Ginger converses with her bosses.

However, the game has a typo or two. Tiny nitpick considering the superb quality of the game. Before finishing the game, I had already decided I want another game… and there just might be.

By the end, I feel like a pro especially when I wildly managed multiple complicated customer orders. I memorized some recipes I ran for the first ingredient as soon as I saw the customer’s order and before checking the list of ingredients.

Boy, I wish this feeling would carry over into real life. Cooking in Go Go Gourmet almost makes me want to return to cooking real meals for the family. That’s almost — something about actually chopping and shopping for fresh ingredients doesn’t have the appeal of doing it virtually.

The ingredients of good music, high addiction factor, sharp graphics, and original concept make an award-winning recipe in Go Go Gourmet. Please, sir developer, may I have some more?