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Stand O' Food 3
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Graphics & Sound:
Stand O' Food 3 is another fun time management game from G5 Entertainment, the folks who brought you the Supermarket Mania series. Stand O' Food 3 maintains the bright and cheery look of Supermarket Mania and you'll even see lots of familiar faces. Nikki from Supermarket Mania stops in often and the pair kindles a little romance during the course of the game, plus all of the customers you dealt with in Supermarket Mania 2 like to eat at Ronnie's place as well. You'll be making sandwiches, lasagnas and pies, depending on which location you are at, and for the most part, things are easy to spot and distinguish. The eggs look like eggs and the chicken patties look appropriate, etc.
The background music is cheerful and upbeat and I'll catch myself humming it from time to time, probably because I have been playing the game so much lately. It's not radio worthy, but the various tunes for the restaurants work for their respective themes. I really like the Italian-inspired music that plays at the lasagna locations. It's very pleasant and I found those to be my favorite levels, possibly because of the music.
As Ronnie goes about the city, opening new locations, you'll find them very familiar if you played Supermarket Mania 2 because they are the same areas that Nikki opened all of her supermarkets in Tinsel Town. They aren't duplicated, however, so it didn't feel cheap, but more of a little inside joke for those who had played G5's previous release.
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Gameplay:
As Ronnie, the manager of various Stand O' Food locations, it is your responsibility to, well... do everything. You prep the food and serve it to the customers, along with any snacks they may request and you have to do so quickly to not only earn bonus money to progress, but to ensure that they don't storm off. Things start off pretty easy and your recipe will require just a few layers of whatever food item you are preparing. Say for a hamburger, you'll need a bottom bun, a piece of meat, then cheese and a top bun. If you throw on some sauce, you can earn extra money and there are lots of sauces or spices you can buy as add-ons. Some are very, very expensive for you, but can turn an ordinary sandwich/pie/lasagna into a $45 creation!
As you buy upgrades in Stand O' Food 3, you'll then be able to serve snacks before the actual main course. As a customer comes up to the line, they may have an idea bubble above them for an ice cream or cup of coffee, a soft drink or an order of fries. You will then have a set amount of time to serve them the snack. If you don't, you lose out on that additional money, but there didn't seem to be any other penalty. Some customers don't want to order snacks and they simply come to the counter with an idea bubble of what type of main course they want. The recipe, of which there are many for the three main types of food, will show as a visual in their idea bubble. If you hover over it, it will increase in size, which helps when you get into 7 and 8 layer food items, which can be really tough. You have a series of conveyor belts that bring you food items in a mix and match way. The idea is to build the sandwich/pie/lasagna from the ground up, placing each item in the correct order. You can buy up to 5 side plates in which to place unwanted items without the cost of throwing them away, so this is a good purchase to make as soon as you can. You'll have an area on-screen that will tell you how many customers you need to serve to get through the level and you can do so with a rank of Poor, Good, Incredible and possibly levels in between, although those were the only three I experienced.
Since Torg, the antagonist who plagued Nikki's store in Supermarket Mania 2, is still creeping about, from time to time he will trash your conveyors, forcing you to experience some tough bonus levels. Here, your conveyors are broken and instead of the typical glut of food items you have, you might have boxes of food items at the foot of the conveyors and you have to run to each one, grabbing a food item before it falls to the floor and place it in the appropriate box. In other levels, you will have 3 particular recipes for the day on signs by the counter and you can make any of these sandwiches and the customer will gladly take it. Still others will have customers approach a conveyor, waiting for food and you must click the appropriate one and slide their food to them, and also catch their dirty dishes which come back the opposite way. These levels were my least favorite because it was sometimes difficult to tell which conveyor a customer was "at" since they were in between two and, in a pinch, it wasn't easily determinable. |
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Difficulty:
Stand O' Food 3 starts out pretty easy and slowly ramps you up. A 3 layer sandwich is infinitely easier to build than a 7 or 8 layer one. As I mentioned earlier, the bonus levels where the people stand by the conveyors were difficult simply because it wasn't obvious which conveyor was the correct one to press and selecting the wrong one results in food loss and costs you money. When I found myself in the highest levels, making 8 level food items, there was a point that a customer wanted a sandwich with a particular food item on it, like mushrooms for instance. When I looked at my conveyors, there were no mushrooms to be found. Anywhere. Now, I find it to be a challenge when the mushrooms are 7 items deep and you have to use very fancy footwork to get to them, but when they aren't even visible on the conveyor belts and you have to throw away a bunch of food to even hope to find them? Well, that's not cool. This happened twice on the same level and, in a fit of frustration, I turned off the game. I was finally able to get through the level without this happening, so maybe it was a glitch and maybe it was the luck of the draw. What does make things easier are upgrades like an air conditioner system that is costly, but makes customers more patient, or a jukebox to make them happier in line.
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Game Mechanics:
Stand O' Food 3 uses basic mouse controls only. You will left click to pick up an item, and click to place it back down again. You'll click to purchase upgrades and click to apply sauces. It's just basic moves for any time management game and the controls work well for the game. The upgrades that I mentioned earlier make for an easier time and will also help you to earn a lot more money. You can buy add-on sauces and spices that will increase the price of your food items greatly, and some that will increase it moderately. It takes time for Ronnie to walk over and add sauce, so you want to use this wisely. I found that by buying the most expensive add-on I could and using that exclusively as long as I could, then swapping to the next most expensive add-on, I could save a lot of time in running down the line and selecting just the right sauce for the recipe. It just so happens that the two most expensive add-on sauces/spices are catch-all and work with every recipe, so it's a step I cut out and it saved time and made more money.
I do wish that the jukebox would turn on automatically and just keep the customers more happy in general, but instead, you have to click it when they are getting antsy and, with it, they start toe-tapping and chill a bit. You can buy to-go boxes at a cost of $10 each, which allow you to stack the ingredients in a recipe in any order and throw them in the box and the customer walks away happy. In real life, this happens to me a lot, but once I get home and see the mess, I'm not too happy. Luckily, although the inspiration for this item was probably a developer's bad drive-thru experience, it's a really helpful and worthwhile item to keep well stocked.
You can also earn Awards, anything from opening 20+ restaurants, to serving a certain number of a particular food item, to even having 5 angry customers in line at once. You earn them whether you are trying or not, so it's nice to see what you've accomplished in the game and to have a field guide for what you have left to do.
Overall, I enjoyed Stand O' Food 3. I still like Supermarket Mania 2 better, but Stand O' Food 3 gives you over 70 levels of time management fun, so if you think you might like it, check out the demo and give it a whirl.
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows XP/Vista, 1.0 GHz Processor, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 8.0, 70 MB Hard Drive, 800x600 Minimum screen resolution |
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Test System:
Windows Vista, 2 GHz AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core Processor, 8GB RAM, Realtek High Definition Audio On-Board Sound, NVIDIA GeForce 8300
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