Cooking Dash

by PlayFirst Inc.



Category: Games
Price: $2.99 (currently on sale, usually $4.99)

Turns your iPhone into a crack pipe for girls

Every man in the modern world knows what the Diner Dash games are, but only because they've had to surrender control of their computers for hours when girlfriends came over to play "that restaurant game for a few minutes". There were no iPhones back in the early days of the franchise, so hearing that line usually meant you were in for an afternoon and evening of boredom. When PlayFirst released Diner Dash for the iPhone in September 2008, the blood drained from our collective faces. iTunes passwords were changed, PIN code locks were turned on, and litters of gift puppies were deployed as pre-emptive countermeasures. Thankfully, their fickle minds had already moved on. We breathed sighs of relief and foolishly went back to Monster Trucks Nitro and Tiger Woods Golf, thinking calamity had been averted.

It is now 2009. I come to you, brothers, with the gravest of news. With the new Cooking Dash game, Diner Dash has been improved upon, expanded, and given far more depth than in its two previous sequels on the Mac & PC. And it's on the iPhone for a fraction of a desktop game's price. Now, our women will be locked in the most useless and unsatisfying of pursuits: cooking virtual meals that we will never taste, in virtual kitchens, on devices that we need to touch at least once every five minutes for the sustenance of life itself. Oh God. If it took them hours before to get enough of taking orders and delivering food to the right tables, think of how many days our depravation will last now that they have to cook and prepare those orders too!

Gentlemen, we must deny it its very existence. The council has decided that in order to avoid the ruin threatened by Cooking Dash, we must embark on a worldwide campaign of feigned ignorance with regards to all things technological. The Brotherhood wills it. So if your girlfriend asks, you no longer know what's "a good game to play on the bus", or how to "save YouTube videos". The words "reboot", "restore", and "settings" are no longer in your vocabulary. A malfunctioning computer should bring tears to your eyes, not the fiery anticipation of challenge.

This task is far greater than any faced by our fathers or their fathers' fathers. It will be hard, but we must bite down and dig deep to find the courage we will need to win this war. I wish I could stand before you and promise that this will be over in just a decade, but such actions are folly. What I can promise you, however, is this: We! Will! Outlast! Cooking! Dash!

Godspeed, my brothers. HOO-AH!

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Positives: Polished gameplay mechanics, many levels, more challenging than Diner Dash
Unpositives: Kitchen interface is nearly too cluttered at times, with multiple ingredients
Rating For Men Traitors Who Like Time Management Games: 4 / 5

Cooking Dash does NOT exist in the iTunes App Store.
The free Cooking Dash Lite does not either.