Stand O’Food

The business style games just keep coming. In these games, we play an owner or a worker bee in a business, racing to fulfill customer orders and keep them happy. Stand O’Food comes closest to resembling a big McFast Food chain.

Stand O’Food has two game types: Meal Quest (serve customers until completing the level) and Lunch Rush (endlessly serving folks). I made decent progress in Meal Quest when the game up and shut down on me. In re-opening the game, I lost my saved game and had to start over. Aggravating, but I know many things can cause a game to shut down and aren’t always the fault of the game.

The game starts slowly as you fill simple orders and customers slowly line up. But after climbing a few levels, the orders get complicated and you can’t always see an ingredient in a sandwich even when moving the mouse pointer over the sandwich to view it a little larger.

Since the ingredients appear in no particular order on conveyor belts, you have to quickly figure out what food item you’ll take from which rolling thing to ensure you don’t get stuck with an unavailable ingredient. I did get a kick out of the game when I received vegetarian and bread-less orders. The variety of orders gives the game a needed lift.

The game comes with a tutorial, but it annoyed me because it kept interrupting the game to let me know about a new sandwich, so I turned it off. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out when certain things occurred like the big dollar sign or the crane appearing.

The graphics also don’t have the high quality found in other games. I prefer not to take up the full screen when playing my games so I can switch to other applications faster, but this one takes up the full screen no matter which option I choose. It also hogs the computer’s memory more than any other game I’ve played recently. When clicking ahead or clicking buttons from the upgrade page, the buttons don’t always work (even when accurate) and this can mess up an order. More frustration.

In the game, you make the food and it needs to be in the same order as the customer’s request, you add upgrades based on how much money you have and you move from store to store as you advance in the Meal Quest game. The stores contain stars, which I assume represent the difficulty. They also have names that give you a hint as to what kind of sandwiches (over 80) you’ll make. These features don’t add to the fun as they do in other similar games.

The nice thing about these games is you can try them before plunking down lots o’ cash (well, not that much). Personally, I think the Diner Dash series and Cake Mania games offer more than Stand O’Food. I haven’t played Delicious Deluxe, but from reading its description and checking the screen shots, it may be a better choice.

Hey, the game is one of the most popular as of this writing, so my opinion doesn’t match the majority. Tell us what you think.

Try this game free.

System Requirements

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• 500MHz or faster Processor
• 64 MB RAM
• 3D Accelerated Graphics Card
• Microsoft DirectX 7.0 or better

[tags]stand o’food,games,gaming,pc games, Meryl K. Evans[/tags]