Rather Dashing

In Diner Dash, you play the role of Flo, a waitress with ambitions that will lead her straight into restaurant entrepreneurship. In the meantime, however, she must perform all the duties of a working girl while she raises the money to see her dream realized. Luckily for you, being a waitress has never been this much fun!

You will perform several tasks as Flo, and they will increase in number and difficulty as the game progress. These tasks include:

• Seating Customers: Click and drag to seat customers at a table. Match the color of the seat with that of the customer's clothing to score bonus points!
• Taking Orders: Take down all of the customer's orders and rush them back to the cook so that he may prepare them.
• Serving Coffee: Customers are impatient, so a nice hot cup of joe should keep them occupied while they wait for their food.
• Serving Food: Of course you'll serving food - it wouldn't be much of a restaurant if you didn't. When an order is up, pick it up from the counter and bring it to the appropriate table.
• Serving Checks: Ah, the check. You'll need to pick up a lot of these babies if you're going to make it all the way to entrepreneur stardom. When customers are done eating, zip on over to their table and give them their bill.
• Cleaning Tables: Nobody wants to sit at a messy table, let alone eat at one. Clean tables after every customer to make room for new ones. This also involves grabbing the dirty dishes and throwing them into the dirty dish cart.

All of these tasks are done by simply pointing and clicking. While it may seem simple at first, as business picks up (and it will), you'll find that things can get hectic very fast. If customers aren't served in time, they'll get increasingly frustrated, and eventually take their business elsewhere. Each customer (or group of customers) have a star meter, showing their level of contentment in the form of stars. The more stars, the better.

As I mentioned above, you can get bonus points for matching customers' clothes with the chair that they're sitting in. You can also rack up extra points by performing one task several times uninterrupted. However, if you put off other activities for the sake of keeping a chain going, you're bound to get angry customers.

Fantastic Presentation

Diner Dash sports a beautiful cartoon-like graphical theme that looks absolutely amazing from an artistic perspective. Everything is wonderfully detailed and is overall just a pleasure to look at. The game makes use of fantastic ambience as well, from the chit chat of the patrons to the "ding" of the order up bell.

A Real Keeper

While it might not be the most intellectually stimulating game on the market, Diner Dash does call for quick thinking and lightning-fast reflexes and provides a more than adequate challenge. The story is well done enough to warrant following it, and once you reach the end, you'll actually feel like you've accomplished something. Above all, it provides tremendous fun of a very addictive nature.