Preview by: Toni Schwartz

Yes, it’s the same Diner Dash that we all know and love, making its DLC debut on all three major consoles via Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, and WiiWare. The premise is unchanged from every other Diner Dash game in existence.

You control Flo, a businesswoman-turned restaurant owner/waitress. You have to earn enough money at the end of the day by serving as many people as possible. This can be a challenging task, as you must juggle clients with a myriad of idiosyncrasies. For example, career women eat fast and leave large tips but are very impatient. Meanwhile, old men are much more patient but are cheap tippers and take forever to eat. Teenagers are very chatty and thus annoy people who sit at nearby tables.

Over each group of customers’ heads is a row of hearts, which count down the longer they have to wait for service (e.g. being seated, receiving their food, paying the check). When this drops to zero, they angrily storm out of your restaurant and you lose money. However, their hearts also decrease when they’re annoyed by nearby patrons, such as chatty teenagers. Therefore, it’s not enough that you have to serve customers as quickly as possible, but you have to figure out which types should be served first, which you can temporarily put off serving, and which types should not sit next to each other. You can imagine that things can get hairy when you have to deal with a long line of customers waiting to be seated and serve nine tables of customers at the same time.

While PC-playing Diner Dash veterans may be used to a point-and-click method to direct Flo to various tables and stations around the restaurant, I found that using traditional controllers felt just as smooth. On the Xbox 360 you move Flo around using the left thumbstick and press the A button for her to pick up orders, clear plates, and other tasks. In fact, you can even hotkey the buttons to specific areas like the dirty dish cart or podium. At first I had trouble targeting certain customers who were standing in line, until the Hudson Soft rep told me that I could use the left trigger to select which group of customers I wanted to seat.

One interesting feature is online multiplayer. While this was present in Diner Dash: Hometown Hero for the PC, it was only for two people at a time. The console versions of Diner Dash will offer an astounding eight-person online multiplayer feature, both for cooperative and competitive play. However, I have my reservations about this. I played co-op with another journalist and it already felt a little cramped and hectic with two waitresses running around the small playing field of the restaurant. I can only imagine what it would be like with six other people. Furthermore, I’ve tried online multiplayer with DD: Hometown Hero and to be honest I was never a big fan of it. You get more money by chaining skills (e.g. picking up orders, clearing dirty dishes) but having another person there disrupts the chain since he or she can sometimes get to those customers first. Still, I suppose that it would be funny to witness the chaos from eight people trying to work in a tiny restaurant.

Because there’s hardly any difference between the console version of Diner Dash and previous iterations, the game may appeal more to those who have not played the PC, DS, or cell phone versions. After all, why purchase a game that you’ve already played in another format? New players, on the other hand, can finally get their fill when the game drops later this year.