Starting Your Own Restaurant, the Gameplay

In Restaurant City players are in charge of their own fully functioning restaurant. Each player starts out small with several tables, chairs, and stoves. Before the game can begin users have to hire some of their Facebook friends to work for them. A quick click on their avatar and then desired job will accomplish this task. Once all of the waiters, chefs, and janitors have been assigned players are ready for business. Restaurant City has a helpful Open Hours feature that allows players to choose opening and closing hours to fit into their playing schedule. This option prevents users from having to rush and log back in simply to check on their restaurant. There are various shifts available for managers to choose from. Each shift has a coin fee. Shorter shifts earn more profits since they’re cheaper. Players can schedule their employees to work any length of time from 30 minutes to 24 hours. Employees complete tasks automatically following their assigned duties. Janitors clean up spills, waiters serve meals, and chefs stay busy behind the stoves cooking. Players take on more of a managerial role so the gameplay is fairly slow paced. Coins and XP are earned through leveling dishes, serving customers, and visiting neighbors. Players spend most of their time using strategy to boost their rank, collecting necessary ingredients, and decorating. Each restaurant has a popularity number. The more satisfied customers the higher the rating will go up. Users have to figure out how to balance the staff in a way that will serve all of the incoming customers in a timely manner. Customers who have to wait too long will walk out and decrease the restaurant’s popularity rating.

The Ingredient Hunt

Restaurant City has a very diverse menu. It’s divided into four categories consisting of a starter, main, dessert, and drink. Players can serve customers Tuna Steak with Vegetables, Russian Cappuccino, Lobster, Hamburger and Fries, Pink Lemonade, Mango Pudding, Pork and Apple Chops, Chocolate Cake, Beef Enchilada, or Strawberry Milkshake. In order to cook a variety of meals, ingredients are needed. The ingredient market is limited and very expensive. There are only three items are on sale per day for coins. The rest of the ingredients require Playfish Cash to purchase. If a player doesn’t want to spend real money for common items like water, ice, bread, butter, flour, sugar, cheese, and eggs than they have to rely on their neighbors and other methods to obtain them. Players can receive ingredients daily for free by logging in and correctly be answering the Food Quiz. The questions often vary from real life cooking techniques to food trivia. It’s quite challenging. This is a unique feature in the game that educates players in a fun way. In Restaurant City an option to a garden is available similar to the game Pet Society. Players can grow their own fresh ingredients. The garden lot expands as a user levels up. Although it’s a nice touch there is no choice in the type of seeds that you can plant. A mysterious bag of unmarked seeds will produce random spices, vegetables, or fruit when ripe. New dishes can be learned and leveled up to increase XP when all the required ingredients have been collected. Neighbors can assist in the hunt for ingredients as well.

Checking Out the Competition

In Restaurant City friendly competition and friendship work hand in hand. Players can visit their friends’ restaurants to help out or take a trip to a random street to see how other restaurant moguls businesses are operating. Visiting neighbors can earn coins, XP, and a free ingredient. Remove trash from their floor like spilled soda cans, discarded pizza slices, and banana peels by clicking on them. Sometimes their restaurant may have a nasty leak, a blazing fire, a penguin invasion, a sleeping bear scaring away customers, or giant mushrooms in the garden that requires immediate attention. The first time a player visits a new neighbor they earn one free ingredient. This makes neighbors an essential part of gameplay. Users must rely on friends to earn a significant amount of XP to level up and to receive ingredients which can be tedious at times. Players can also trade ingredients with each other by clicking the Ingredient Trade icon. For some players who do not like to depend on their friends to advance in games constantly joining neighbor adds lists and bargaining for ingredients can be exhausting. All neighboring restaurants on the street are ranked in order by popularity. This system lets players know exactly how their restaurant measures up when compared to their buddies. Restaurant City takes full advantage of its multiplayer aspects allowing users to travel to random streets with players who are not neighbors and rate their restaurants.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

The customization in Restaurant City is exceptional. Everything can be personalized from a player’s avatar to the minuscule details in the building’s exterior. Users have the option of keeping their avatar basic or personalizing it. Give your avatar a rock star Mohawk, a Princess Leila hairdo, villain attire, or cool shades. The game has dozens of various themes to choose from including a Roadside Diner, Saloon, Moroccan, Medieval, Eastern, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Psychedelic 60s, and Victorian style. There are also some fun unexpected designs like the UFO, Zombie, Ghost, Anime, and Princess available. It’s possible for players to create any kind of restaurant they want. The necessary basics like chairs, tables, stoves, toilets, and even drink dispensers come in an assortment of customized styles. Depending on the theme or desired look users have hundreds of items that they can add to renovate their restaurant. Click and drag new patterned tile floors, colored wallpaper, arcade machines, dividers, walls, aquariums, stereos, and arcade machines. The outside of the restaurant can be redesigned also. Change the building size from a small size to a behemoth building base. Attach various roofs or use decorations like a roving spotlight, balloons, lanterns, flags, flowers, canopy, menu signs, bouncer, benches, robot chef, and a magical unicorn. A very cool feature in Restaurant City is the music player that can be customized as well. Users can change the default elevator melody that plays over and over again to a catchier tune. Choose from the classic Pineapple Overture, upbeat My Irish Heart, Asian-inspired Delicate Spring, Latin Fiesta Brothers, or the cool mellow Lounge Lizard Slide.

Let’s find out!

• OK, so if it is even possible to get paid to test video games, how much can you make?

Video game tester salaries start at the bottom at about $18,000 annually and go all the way up to $55,000. This translates to about 8 – 14 dollars an hour. Keep in mind, usually these are temporary positions. Still, not bad for a job you can do literally naked in some cases.

• I’m looking over my report card right now, and I see lots of F’s and absolutely no A’s or even B’s. Will video game companies ask about my grades?

Luckily for you, in the video game industry, being a tester is considered an entry-level job, and does not require a college degree. However, if you are trying to become a game designer or programmer then I suggest you start hitting the books more; it’s a high paying and competitive business!

• I live in the middle of nowhere, and my only connection to humans not riding goats for amusement is the Internet. Can I STILL become a game tester?

As little as 10 years ago, if you wanted to become a video game tester you would have to live in a big city where major game studios were located, for example Chicago, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles… etc.

However, now there are work- from- home- video game testing opportunities that are yours as long as you have a console and or an Internet connection. Hurray for modern technology!

• OK, so now that we know that video game companies don’t care about my lack of academic excellence, what qualifications are they looking for?

Focused: You have to be able to pay attention and focus for long periods of time, even when you are bored with a game. This seems fairly ironic to me when you consider that video game player stereotypes tend to be loopy ADHD candidates. I would know, I’m one of em!

Attentive To Detail: Part of the job is learning how to spot bugs, and then make that same bug happen predictively. Again, again, again, and AGAIN.

Good Communicator: You will be working with a development team, and will need to be able to express precise steps that you took in order to make a bug in the game happen.

“Well dang man, I was just kind of messing around for a while and suddenly everything went black! Hello? Are you guys still there? Guys?”

This will not do ^

Positive Attitude: Like any business, video game companies are looking for candidates with great attitudes who like to work hard. Again, very ironic when you look at most of the population on x-box live, as they are hardly model citizens.

Goat Evolution – Clicker Game

If you are looking for cool animal games and you like goats, then Goat Evolution is one crazy and entertaining game. There is no doubt that goats are hilarious animals – they scream funnily, climb trees and even mountains. Goat Evolution stimulates a situation in which mutations start happening to the crazy goats – you will combine goats to evolve them and discover their most curious and bizarre forms. If you think goats are not crazy enough then this is your chance to make them even more extreme. The graphics of this cool game are brilliant and amusing, its gameplay is interesting and challenging, and the overall experience is pretty addictive – once you’ve started playing Goat Evolution it’s not going to be easy to stop!

My Talking Tom

My Talking Tom is another excellent game if you’re into cool animal games. In this game you will get to adopt your own talking cat and take care of it lovingly and carefully. You will dress your cat, feed it, take it out for walks, play with it and basically do anything necessary to keep it happy, satisfied and pampered. My Talking Tom is your opportunity to develop a loving relationship with a cute virtual pet, and in case you never had the chance to have a real pet, then this game can be a wonderful substitute.

Angry Birds

Angry Birds is one of the most popular mobile games in the world nowadays, and it has been played, and still is, by millions of people. For those of you who still haven’t tried to play Angry Birds – you should know that it is very, very addictive. Angry Birds belongs to the physics gaming genre, and it revolves around the angry birds who want to take revenge of the evil pigs by destroying their defenses. It has intuitive and friendly controls, but it’s by no means a simple game – it has some challenging levels and difficult missions, but once you’ll start playing it, putting the phone down will be the hardest mission of them all.

Firstly, Candy Crush comes with somewhat interesting story line. Many would say, it is indeed childish and cartoonish but just as in most online adventure games, the game gives users a different experience from their story telling element. Many people do find Candy Crush characters cute and funny. As ironic as it may sound, many users are still curious what happens next although we do know what kind of story line we are being presented here.

Simple user interface that makes it easy for users to appeal to mass market majority. Anyone with half a brain would be easily ‘turn-on’ by the first 30 levels and you find players of all age groups, playing Candy Crush. The graphics user interface ( GUI ) for this game deceives the majority that this is indeed an easy game. When you get to the higher levels you discover that level of difficulty increases exponentially and one finds themselves repeating the same level multiple times. It either drives / motivates you to move forward or breaks you by testing your patience.

Social networking element. Like most mobile games, the social networking element adds additional emotional feelings into the experience. When your friends start sharing achievements, the peer pressure mounts when your scores are publicly announced. It is common to have a few friends that constantly directly or indirectly brag about how great they are. Definitely an emotional button is pressed which normally motivates to work on your achievement.

Continuity of content. As in most big online games, regular updates in content keeps the game and eco system alive. Their developers King.com has constantly made efforts to constantly give users a reason not to get bored and keep you busy scratching your head on how to complete these levels. The level of frustration is often sufficient to make you conduct online purchases, to aid in the level completion. The punch line is just spending real money for aid doesn’t guarantee that will complete the level which may add to further frustration. So which category do you fall under?

Hollywood tends to simplify the back-stories of comic book characters, and deliver their most basic elements to the general public. An epic tale that takes place somewhere in the universe pales in front of a story that is set on Earth, since this is the only type that humans can handle, or maybe, this is what Hollywood wants us to think. A Green Lantern game with this direction will cause a great disservice to his character and myth.

The Planet Oa is the very essence of the mythology of this character. This space sector 0 is home to the Green Lanterns, totaling 7,200 of them. They are the oldest and wisest (as what they think) beings of the universe, and they are known as the Guardians of the Universe. You heard this right. There is not only one such guy, but literally thousands of them, and they function as the intergalactic police force that guards the universe. The comics show off all the wild creatures and amazing planets that the DC Universe is made up of. Therefore, this should be present in a Green Lantern game and not ignored.

The hero’s world is so huge that it creates unlimited possibilities for video game projects. Imagining what a grade-A art direction group could achieve on a Green Lantern game can be both mind-boggling and mouth-watering. Sky is the limit in the literal sense of the word. It would be a big waste of potential to just stick to the film or comic license.

The Green Lantern’s most vital tool is his imagination, though the ring is quite important as well. Whatever they desire becomes a reality and this should be shown by a game on this subject. This is certainly a difficult job, but if the game does not give unlimited options to the gamers for ring constructs, this might as well be considered as a failure, as seen by a majority of this super hero’s fans.

Characters

The game offers a wide array of playable characters for completing your team of five. Generally, there are four types in which you can choose from:

• Assassin – can inflict heavy damages on vulnerable enemies, but may be held back by its susceptibility to enemy attacks as well
• Warrior – resilient to attacks, warriors are capable of taking on waves of enemy minions
• Support – these types can reverse tables for any team through healing and giving out added abilities to allies
• Specialist – whether it is to act as the team’s commander or siege, their specific expertise may come in handy in developing the overall force of your team

The right set of heroes is one of the key elements of surviving Heroes of the Storm. But it doesn’t end with customizing your team’s abilities. Here are a few tips as to how to effectively maneuver your hero:

• Avail of the “try” feature – To get an initial feel as to a hero’s stats, the game allows players a free trial of using it for a pseudo-combat. This minimizes the risk of regretting the gold you spent on someone not really compatible for your strategies.
• Raise the levels of as many heroes as possible – A common mistake of gamers is focusing on one character alone. At minimum, try to level up every hero you have available to level 5. This unlocks key abilities and can also help you tailor-fit team composition to your enemies’ weaknesses.
• Practice new techniques – Before immediately trying out that strategy you’re itching to use, test it first through a practice or co-op game. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure you won’t screw things up in an actual match.

Game Play

Although there are similarities, Heroes of the Storm has distinct features in contrast of the likes of DOTA and League of Legends. Let’s take a look at some things to remember before jumping into the game:

• Gaining experience – Your role in the team doesn’t matter, nor does your favorite “last hit” strategy. Every member gains experience in a constant manner as long as all of the lanes are occupied.
• Team dynamics is a must – Though it may be difficult at first to communicate with fellow newbies during in the beginning, note that this game is all about team work. Communication and building strategies is what will set you apart from other players.
• Battlefields greatly differ – The game features unique arenas, but they all have one thing in common – there exists a key event that is vital to win against the enemy team. For instance, one requires you to pay gold to a pirate captain for him to charge his ship’s cannons against the enemy lines.