With the price of groceries going up by the minute, Supermarket Mania offers a great deal in keeping you busy for hours avoiding a trip to the grocery store. Like the coffee shop on every corner, Torg has supermarkets all over town giving Nikki little choice but to go work there as a stocker.

Nikki doesn’t like the looks of Torg when scary-looking robots greet her on her first day of work. After four days of excellent work, Mr. Torg fires her and her cashier friend. He activates the robots to run his stores. The girls find a better place in a run down pop store (well, there’s no mom as far as we can see) run by Mr. Clarence. He trusts the girls to run the store alone.

The girls deal with different types of customers who have different styles of shopping. Granny takes her time and has plenty of patience while teens have zero patience and move quickly. Kids tear up the place until you have your security guard friend, Mr. Barefist (I wonder how they came up with that), blow the whistle to stop their antics. Barefist also comes in handy in stopping brazen thieves.

You have two ways to catch a thief. Notify Barefist while the thief has a circle over his head to stop the thief who moves on to the next attempt or leaves the store. Or be patient and let the circle over the thief’s head fill and shake — alert Barefist at that time and you earn a cash bonus. However, the shaky thing doesn’t happen every time so waiting for a full circle could lead to thief getting away with … well, theft.

Upgrades are present ranging from better products that sell for more money and a gumball machine for more tips to a faster loading stockroom and the most expensive one, a bigger cart. As you advance levels more upgrades show up to help keep customer patience from spiraling when so many require your time in stocking the shelves.

Occasionally, a celebrity shops at the store catching the attention of all shoppers who stand by snapping pictures. While the celeb works around the store, Nikki must keep shelves stocked for celebrities as they don’t wait long. Another unique feature in Supermarket Mania is Super Shop. Click the thumbs up symbol at the right time (when you have as many shoppers as possible and as few thieves as possible) so that everyone buys a bunch at once. This drives up sales and Nikki’s carting work as she races around refilling the fast emptying shelves.

The action spreads across five shopping stores including Torg’s for 50 levels. That’s right, Mr. Clarence somehow comes up with the cash for more stores. Nothing illegal mind you. He’s good people.

The game lasts a couple of sittings and gets nutty at times. I’ve yet to beat a Diner Dash (but I made it through Wedding Dash), and I finished Supermarket Mania. It meant repeating a few levels, but all in a game reviewer’s work. So I think the difficulty is on target for the average casual gamer.

Animation and cartoon-style graphics are bright and attractive. The music upbeat with good effects. Decent variety of upgrades and a nice even pace. Animation and cartoon-style graphics are bright and attractive. The music upbeat with good effects. Decent variety of upgrades and a nice even pace.

Supermarket Mania probably falls in the middle of the time management games. Far better than those at the bottom, but not quite as good the best. You’ll spend less money on the game than in a five minute trip to the grocery store and have loads more fun.

Surviving many bad dates can make a single person cranky, but it’s worthwhile when finding the right person to marry. Next comes planning the wedding, which sometimes can feel like a disastrous date. And then the worst wedding nightmare of all — the wedding planner bowing out too close to the wedding, but not close enough to the big day that all the work has been done. Instead, the wedding planner turns the already nervous bride into a panicky one.

The wedding planner hadn’t taken care of the appetizers, side dishes, main dish, honeymoon, flowers, or cake. One bride faced with this situation lucks out with help from her friend, Quinn who happens to be a friend of Flo’s from the popular Diner Dash series that started the game genre often referred to as “Diner Dash style.” Such games involve a lot of frenzy where the main character must accomplish tasks, keep customers happy and reach the goal for each level to advance to the next level.

Wedding Dash has the advantage of being a Diner Dash spin off complete with the same cartoon-style graphics, story line and likeable characters. Welcome to the wedding-themed version of Diner Dash. One might think after three versions of Diner Dash that the series could start to turn formulaic. On the contrary, Wedding Dash earns its success. Sure, Flo appears in the game on occasion, but Quinn does the heavy-duty work.

After saving her friend’s wedding, Quinn wins another job and soon the weddings start pouring in. As an accidental wedding planner, Quinn starts small by holding backyard weddings. As business grows, she moves up to a hotel, ship, island and castle. Before the reception begins, Quinn selects three things based on the bridge and groom’s background and interests. For each correct selection, the player earns $100 toward the next level of the game.

Players, in the role of Quinn, seat attendees at the tables ensuring they seat the guest with the right person or away from the wrong person. Quinn’s assistant picks up the gifts taking them to the bride and groom, feeds three dishes to every guest and occasionally does special orders such as a request for a glass of wine or pass on a song request to the DJ.

Quinn doesn’t sit around as she puts out the fires, sometimes literally when the kitchen turns smoky. She also soothes the aunt, handles the drunken uncle discreetly, shoos away bees (carefully) and dogs, stops the cake table from falling and averts any other potential disaster. Upgrades appear from time to time giving players the chance to speed up staff, increase the food table size or gain points whenever a guest steps out on the dance floor.

Where Wedding Dash stands out is in the variety. The venues, the wedding couple, the guests, the potential disasters and the funny comments from the couple keep the game moving, As the game progresses, guests ask to move and sit next to someone else keeping things hopping. The challenge increases as you progress, while at times the situation turns frantic forcing the player to replay the level too many times. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s where the biggest frustration with the game dwells. As with most Diner games, each level has a goal score and an expert score. Reaching the expert score rarely happens in this one.

The other nitpick is that clicks don’t always “take.” Click on two dishes and after walking over to the table to serve them to guests, you realize your waitress only has one dish in hand. That wastes precious time which could mean the difference between making and not making the next level.

Typical of a good casual game, two modes are available — the story mode is known as Career Mode and ongoing mode with no story is Endless Reception (plays exactly like it sounds!). No matter the footsteps, Wedding Dash deserves its applause and a toast to many days of gaming bliss.

P.S. Southpaws, Quinn is a lefty!

Download and try Wedding Dash.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista
• Pentium III 700MHz or faster processor
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• DirectX 7.0 or later
• 25MB available disk space

System Requirements: Mac

• Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer
• G4 800 MHz or faster, or G5 or Intel processor
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• 25MB available disk space

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Meryl Evans