Tag: Cake Mania

Casual games and marketing

Gamasutra has an article on Big Fish Games’ CSO explaining that the “hardcore” and “casual” aren’t sufficient categories to divide the market up, and arguing that we need more categories with more kinds of game. Which is true, but I can’t help finding it a little ironic considering the source.

Meanwhile, I’ve been playing some of Chocolatier’s The Great Chocolate Chase, which is a time-management variation on their usual theme. It’s almost entirely a replay of Diner Dash, Cake Mania, Vogue Tales, etc., which is disappointing. It’s also not as well tuned as it could be: at least, I got relatively smoothly through quite a few levels and then have completely bombed out at level 40, which I can’t pass despite many replays: even if I manage to serve every customer without turning any of them away (quite a feat at this level), I’m not making my target for the day.

I’m very slightly curious about the (slender, minimal) threads of story built into the game, but that may not be enough to propel me past this plateau.

Casual Games of Assembly

Originally this was going to be part of the same post as the one on Puzzles of Aesthetics: I started out talking about fashion games, in general. But I quickly realized that JoJo’s Fashion Show was one kind of game and all the other fashion games were something else entirely.

So this half of the post is about games like Vogue Tales, Dress Shop Hop, and — by extension — Cake Mania, Turbo Subs, Go Go Gourmet, and the astonishing Golden Hearts Juice Bar. (That’s not a good kind of astonishment.)

There’s not a lot of IF stuff in here at all, really, since the kind of challenge involved is almost entirely about speed, and wouldn’t translate well.

Continue reading “Casual Games of Assembly”