This actually plays another key role in Hot Dog King. In some districts, such as the Harbor, people really don't care too much about the quality of their food but rather about the revealing nature of what your counter ladies are wearing. In the City Center it's the other way around; your ladies better be dressed respectably and the food better be tasty. To tailor to either side of the fence you must first visit the clothing wholesaler to purchase anything from nice dresses to skimpy bathing suits as well as different bits of shoes and jewelry. In an almost RPG fashion, articles of clothing have stats assigned to them such as bonuses to stamina, food preparation, charisma, exposure, confrontation, and other traits.
As your ladies work their stamina and morale meters gradually diminish, both of which are replenished by telling them to take a break and are more quickly drained when you tell the ladies to clean up the store or repair a broken piece of equipment. An employee with very low morale or stamina performs badly at their job and might quit outright, making the close monitoring of how your ladies are feeling quite important. To give them a quick but expensive boost to their morale you can shower them with gifts in the form of books, CDs, movie tickets, and jewelry which can often be a much easier means of raising all of your ladies' morale across all of your stores rather than micromanaging them all with breaks.
So you've hired a chipper, attractive blond, put her in your Harbor store with a skimpy swimsuit and plentiful food stores, and are keeping an eye on her needs. Suddenly a message pops up saying that your PDA has been infected by a virus. To combat it you don't merely run an antivirus scan -- that would be too predictable. Rather, you must use your arrow keys and space bar to play a mini-game of Space Invaders to make it so none of the descending viruses make it past you and that you sink the Jolly Roger at the top that is firing shots back at you all the while. Other mini-games that pop up both at random and after being triggered due to specific conditions (a dirty store, long lines at the counter, etc.) during gameplay include armed robbery attempts in which robbers storm your store and you enter a stationary first-person mode throw plates at them to gain money (with bonus points for head shots), a matching game when your lines get too long in which you must throw the correct order at the correct customer, and a game of bop-a-rat with one of your ladies on her hand and knees beating rats to death that come scurrying out of the piles of garbage found on your floor (complete with a rainbow colored “PWNED!!” appearing on screen if you nail one with a direct hit). The mini-games are universally entertaining and serve to break up the relatively serious nature of running your restaurants, and more often than not can serve as a means to make a few bucks to boot.
Other features include the ability to take out bank loans with varying interest rates and amounts, setting up advertising campaigns to attract more customers to your store, and even contacting the mob to do anything from putting addictive chemicals in your food or lending you the services of one of their incredibly attractive and efficient women to work in one of your stores all the way to simply whacking one of your competitors for a massive fee.
Hot Dog King has its rough edges, but a surprisingly small amount of them for a budget title. The tutorial does a passable job of explaining how the game elements really interact with one another but lacks bells and whistles such as illuminating the button you need to press to drive home where exactly it is that the game currently wants you to interact with it. Managing your inventory can be confusing in terms of figuring out exactly how many ingredients for more complex menu items you have in stock, and a sorely missing feature is the ability to review all of your sales at day's end so that you may tailor your daily order accordingly.
The character models in Hot Dog King look pretty respectable in and of themselves, but their animations often look a little rough at times. You can only view your store through a set of fixed position cameras than you can rotate around and zoom in and out with, which can often hamper your ability to manage your store effectively such as having a potted plant or a wall blocking a piece of garbage that you want to click on to have one of your ladies clean up. As a whole the graphics in Hot Dog King are somewhat cartoony, which pretty much cements the light hearted theme of the game into place when combined with the off the wall mini-games. The audio can be repetitive at times with the noises that customers make, in particular the noisy eaters sound both overly loud and by the end of your second day you'll want to beat them with that soup ladle. The title theme is a lighthearted pop track, and for better or worse you're likely to get it stuck in your head for at least a couple days.
Essentially Hot Dog King is a title that one can point to as a pretty clear example of why budget titles can be just as worthwhile if not more so than standard retail games. At its core the game is an entertaining fast food simulation, while at the same time the peppy, joyful theme and strange mini-games are a welcome change of pace from the norm. Hot Dog King does have a few jagged edges in its gameplay in the form of both somewhat counterintuitive interfaces and in its customer / staff AI, but for the most part the overall quality level is respectable when paired against pretty much any competitor in the genre regardless of its production value. Budget priced or not, Hot Dog King delivers an entertaining spin on the Tycoon genre.
