This week on XBLA we have two top notch titles; Diner Dash, the XBLA remake of the 2003 PC hit, and Gyromancer, the much anticipated puzzler from Square Enix.
Diner Dash
If you’ve ever worked in food service before, this game will give you flashbacks. You play as Flo, a plucky waitress who has to keep her customers happy by seating them promptly, taking their order, bringing them food, bringing the check, and then busing the table so she can seat the next customer. If things take too long, the customers get angry, and leave without tipping. Every unhappy customer takes one star away from you. Once you’re out of stars, it’s game over. There are also a wide variety of multiplayer modes to sink your teeth into either locally, or over XBL. Diner Dash is a pretty good buy at 800 Microsoft Points. Just remember – that price doesn’t include the tip.
Gyromancer
I went through a rough period in my life a couple years back. I lost touch with friends and family, stopped eating and sleeping properly, and I didn’t go out much. I’ll be honest, I had a monkey on my back, and it’s name was Puzzle Quest. It took some time, but with a little work I was able to kick the habit. Now Square Enix is pushing a new poison on me in the form of Gyromancer. You travel the game world with your trained monsters close at hand collecting treasure, and fighting the big evil that’s pestering the land, and by “fighting” I mean sending your monsters to do your dirty work for you. Each monster has special abilities that become available after you’ve cleared enough sets of pieces off the board. Instead of moving just one piece at a time, you rotate four pieces with each move in an effort to line up 3 (or more) of a kind. At 1200 Microsoft Points, I would have liked to see a multiplayer mode included. Each encounter in the game is a battle between your monster, and an enemy monster. This would have translated nicely into some sort of competitive online mode. Still, if you share my puzzle game addiction, then Gyromancer won’t disappoint.
It’s going to be hard to decide which of these two XBLA games to spend your Microsoft Points on this week. Both are highly addictive and provide hours of entertainment. If only there were some way to merge them into one game to make the decision easier… one game about a puzzle-solving monster who waits tables to support their monster family. I would totally buy that game.
