facebook: Cafe World game

Comparing Cafe World with premium MMORPGs was hardly fair. I've played the game now for about a day. While everything I mentioned in my previous post about crafting systems within MMOs maintains accuracy, Cafe World is really more like Sim City meets Greasy Tony's.

For those of you who didn't party with me in their youth, Greasy Tony's was a favorite after-hours Cafe that specialized in very greasy cheese steaks. It, unfortunately was torn down to make room for the expansion of Rutgers Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

If you can imagine rats leaving a sinking ship, and then replace the rats with drunken youngsters falling out of bars with a serious need for pizza, fries, and greasy cheese steaks, all descending upon this little cafe that stayed open for exactly that rush of business - you have a picture of what you might aim to achieve in Cafe World.

A game which seemed terribly simple at first has become rather addicting. As you successfully feed the never ending flow of people into your cafe, the popularity of your cafe increases. As the popularity increases, more people flow through your doors for a bite to eat. If you don't have an open table for them, they wait for a brief moment, but then leave. Of course, they leave disgusted, and your popularity drops slightly. Similarly, if you get them seated, but then not served in a timely fashion, they leave and detract from your popularity.

One nice feature of the game is that, after you have played it for a while, you can (it would seem) determine how hands-on your gameplay is going to be. For example: If you are cooking burgers, they are done cooking in five minutes. You need to be in the game five minutes after you start cooking them, to serve them. If you aren't, after a short while your food will spoil and need to be thrown away. Alternately, however, you could cook up a dish that takes fifteen minutes to complete, or an hour, four hours, or even a day or more. If one wanted to be involved in such a game, but minimally, these dishes which take longer to cook would be the way to go.

In addition to the compulsive adult (yours truly included), this game should appeal to younger people as well. In fact, with some prodding, a young person could easily learn a thing or two about running a business from this game. They would at least have an opportunity to look at profit margins between purchasing the materials needed to make a dish and the amount the end product sells for. I suggest some prodding though, one could easily just click their way through this game without ever giving it any thought.

For me, I find this game exactly the kind of distraction I need (or not) while I'm mining kernite asteroids in Eve-Online. I have several tabs open on facebook while I'm writing this post, and I can hear the "cha-ching" of my onion soup sales going through the roof right now. A cow just moo'd from my FarmVille tab... but we'll have to save that one for another post.