Cook, Serve, Delicious!

I just had a perfect run on the 20th day, just as I was earning my official 1-star rating. It finally gave me enough cash to afford fish, and I have something close to 75% buzz ready to go into my first day with 5 prep stations. I have a feeling that it's all going to go horribly wrong as soon as that 5th order shows up and tips my perfectly balanced act between the 4 lanes that I'm used to. Boy is fish easy to prep, though. I should have gotten it day 1.

I think I'm wearing out on the game at the end of 3 stars... you have to win all the Iron Chef competitions, and they make you do the 'unfair' foods with the stupid keystrokes, so I think I've finished.

Kinda disappointed. There's a lot of promise here, but the bad foods are so poorly done that I've mostly lost interest.

My time with the game is also winding down. I'm about halfway through the 3-star stage of the game. I've bought everything in the equipment menu (except that gold ticket thing that still isn't available) and almost every food item, most of which have been fully (or nearly fully) upgraded. So I'm just not seeing much of an incentive to keep playing much longer, but for a price of only $9, I could not be more pleased with the experience I've had.

It's now also on iPad. I was intrigued when I saw Ryan Davis narrate the Giant Bomb quicklook, and for me the iPad format is ideal. I'm not sure how it hooked me but it really has. I've got 2 stars now. The dating stuff in it is a little silly, IMO, and GETS IN WAY OF MAH COOKIN'! But the rest is great. Ryan Davis got an in-game shout out. If I ever meet him, I know what kind of burger to get him.

I have decided I despise soup. It constantly screws me up. I'm sure part of that is having to swipe to slice veggies on the ipad, when it doesn't always quite recognize. Wish I hadn't wasted the money on the stove and soup. Also wish I could afford other healthy options so I didn't keep getting the negative buzz for all the fattening foods. I should obviously concentrate on upgrading my beer.

Wiser words have never been spoken.

The Quick Look from Giant Bomb made me buy this game a while back. Playing a bit of this tonight and laughing at the 9am brewsky orders

It's a shame it wasn't greenlit on Steam, but still it's worth the $8 download from Humble.

CSD finally got through greenlight with the latest batch of 100 games!

psoplayer wrote:

CSD finally got through greenlight with the latest batch of 100 games!

Awesome. My wife enjoyed the hell out of this, and I've been considering picking it up.

psoplayer wrote:

CSD finally got through greenlight with the latest batch of 100 games!

Finally! Well-deserved. I really enjoyed the game.

concentric wrote:
psoplayer wrote:

CSD finally got through greenlight with the latest batch of 100 games!

Finally! Well-deserved. I really enjoyed the game.

+1

I bought it last year direct from the dev's site, and re-bought it when the Android version was released a few weeks ago. Highly recommend it!

Yeah, this was fun, I got a pretty good number of hours out of it. I finally got tired of it late in the game, as some of the stations just make no sense at all. I didn't feel that the effort of learning them, when they were so poorly designed, was worth it. But I had fun up to three stars, just using the stations that are designed well.

Can't think of this game without thinking of Ryan Davis.

Picked this up during the sale and just blown away by how fun this game is. It's devoured all my time these last couple of days. It's like the perfect blend of rhythm game and plate spinning genre of restaurant sims. So satisfying to tap out recipes and go for a perfect service all day.

I do have a few nitpicks but they didn't really bother me that much. It's a little annoying when the same ingredient is mapped to different buttons across different menu items (e.g. onions can be either O or N), but otherwise I got used to most of the hotkeys. Also I didn't like how steak was about nonsensical spice blends, that one felt the least like actually cooking. The dating stuff was actually really annoying since it was almost impossible to do without messing up some other order, although I guess it does teach you a lesson about texting at work. The final event challenges felt too easy by the time I unlocked them.

Spoiler:

The last Hungry Fest competition was salads and steaks, which I think are two of the easiest foods in the game.

I had fun with this game, and got my money's worth, but some of the stations were just really stupid in terms of mapping ingredients to keys. (I think maybe one of the worst offenders was the soup station, but I don't remember for sure.) Eventually, the game progressed to the point that I was required to use the stupid stations to advance any further, so I shelved it.

But I had a lot of fun with the stations that made sense.

You know you can remap the keys, right?

Nope, had no idea. Was that added later? And does it work per station?

Yeah, you can remap each food item. It's the third option in the menu where you buy new foods. But I think the default mappings are pretty good except for the few times the same ingredient is mapped to different buttons.

The reason some of the mappings are weird is because you have multiple ingredients that start with the same letter, although some of them aren't unlocked until you upgrade the food. So for example in pizza onions is N because tomatoes are O because tomato sauce is T. Or in soup the bowtie noodles are W and the boullion cubes are U because B is bacon and O is onions that are used in later recipes. Also some of the bindings are weird to try and be consistent between foods, so chicken is always K no matter what you're cooking even if C isn't bound for that food item.

Soup was actually my favorite food to cook because it's complicated with a lot of different ingredients but there are only a few different recipes and once you know them all you can knock it out pretty fast. It's the one that feels most like actual cooking and not just tapping out the random selections of toppings. I don't know who would put olives on baked potatoes or nachos. (Also why are the onions for the pizza green onions? Weird.) Also soup is high priced but cheap to upgrade relative to the other expensive foods, but it's certainly one of the hardest to learn.

Soup's my favorite for those exact reasons. It was actually kind of daunting at first, but it's really fun to make.

It's precisely due to the odd default key mapping on PC that the tablet version of the game is my preferred way to play. Instead of having to memorize keys that don't make sense, you just tap the ingredient on the sidebar. So much more straightforward, and as a result, more fun, at least for me.

You can click with the mouse on the PC as well... even switch on-the-fly between keyboard and mouse without any configuration changes, within the day.

I love the crap out of this game.

It'll make next year's GOTY list for sure.

I dunno if you'd get the same sense of speed on a touchscreen. The game felt like typing once you're really in the groove. I tried using the mouse early on but quickly gave up on it.

I picked up an embarrassingly sick amount of games from various Steam, Amazon, etc. holiday sales, but CSD! is the one I'm looking forward to diving into the most.

Carries a bit of melancholy with it as it was one of Ryan Davis' favorite games right before he passed, but on the flip side it also feels like pouring one out in his honor at the same time.

Latrine wrote:

I dunno if you'd get the same sense of speed on a touchscreen.

Sure, the speed is slightly lower on a tablet due to the simple fact that you can type memorized keys on a keyboard faster than tapping icons on a touchscreen, but the sense of urgency to get every order correct and not miss any orders is very much still there.

I'm glad to see this game getting some love. I really enjoyed it. I haven't played it on PC, but the touchscreen play worked very well.

I can't see this game (or the title of this game) without thinking about Ryan Davis.

demonbox wrote:

I can't see this game (or the title of this game) without thinking about Ryan Davis.

Watched the quick look of this earlier today. Although quite honestly it is hard for me to play any game without thinking of Ryan. I remember when the Kinect first came out, they did quick looks of all the Kinect stuff and Ryan was sweating like crazy! I would have loved to see that with the new Xbox.

I really miss him.

I've gotten exactly one achievement unlocked for this game: Forever Remembered. I'm halfway tempted to not play further, if only to ensure that that achievement always remains as the "most recent" achievement on the game page for me... but I don't think he would approve that sort of sentimentality.