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7.9 excellent
When I was a kid I used to spend a month every summer at my grandparents' house. They live in a small town about twelve hours away by car. Growing up in the country, surrounded by forest in a tiny valley, the chance to spend time in a small town with actual paved roads and sidewalks to ride bikes on and neighbors to play with... it was awesome. Anna lives in the country, like me, but instead of visiting her grandparent's house, she whiled away her summer months at her uncle's island, Northern West Caico. Sound familiar? You know it better as Ice Cream Island!
Anna's Ice Cream, from Game On, is a time management game all about serving ice cream. By monkey. Summoned back to Ice Cream Island as a young adult, brown-haired and blue-eyed Anna immediately notices a change in her uncle. He's less cheerful and more sentimental than usual. (He's still got the one gold tooth, though.) Wouldn't you know it, he's decided to retire and that means giving the island paradise and his ice cream vending business to Anna! That is... if she can prove herself worthy. I don't need to tell you that the challenge facing poor Anna involves rushing back and forth, clicking the mouse frantically, and juggling handfuls of customers and their orders at a time. (And monkeys!)
If you're wondering how Anna remains so slim yet spends her summers on Ice Cream Island, I'm wondering the same thing. I love love love <3 <3 <3 Reece's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzards and I can tell you that spending your summers in a town with a Dairy Queen can really do a number on you if you're watching your figure. Anna must be spending nine months on the two sandwich diet just to recover from those summer months.
As for Anna's task, each day her uncle gives her a spot on the island to sell ice cream... and a dollar amount as a goal. She must meet the goal by selling as much ice cream as possible before the day ends, or she fails. Unfortunately there are two obstacles standing in her way. The first is an unconventional conveyor vending system designed by those clowns at Unco Conveyors. The second is monkeys.
Anna stands behind the counter, and when customers materialize (all these time management games can't afford paying artists to draw images of clients walking) and order by word balloon, Anna must click on the type of cone/dish the customer wants. The cone will drop onto a moving conveyor, at the end of which sits a lazy, good-for-nothing monkey named Mikey. If the order isn't completed before it reaches Mikey, the dimwitted monkey will toss it into the trash or eat it himself. Stupid monkey! Argggh! He won't even wait one measly second for Anna to put a cherry on top of the cone. If the customer asked for a cherry-topped cone, and the cone reaches Mikey without a cherry, you can kiss it goodbye. Anna has to start making the it again from the beginning.
The conveyor cannot be stopped! That's rule number one on Ice Cream Island. You can speed it up, though. As usual in time management games, customers will pay you more (via tips) if their orders are delivered quickly. And they'll eventually get mad and leave if kept waiting. You can tell a customer is impatient because their word balloon starts fading to dark blue and jumping around like a grasshopper in a box.
As the cone travels slowly along the conveyor, click on a flavor of ice cream and then again on the cone to put a scoop in the cone. If the customer asked for more than one scoop and they happen to be different flavors, you can add them in any order. This never works in real life, your hands just get sticky. Add toppings - if any were ordered - by clicking on them and then on the cone again. Finally it will reach Mikey the monkey and he'll put it on the tray next to him. (Unless you made a mistake, in which case he'll hoot and toss it into the trash, or eat it. Argh!) Click on the tray, and Mikey's girlfriend, Molly the monkey, will come to the counter and pick up the tray. Click on the table that ordered the ice cream, and Molly will deliver the order. After finishing their meal, customers pay and leave. Some will ask for a napkin to wipe their mouths, some will make a second order.
Anna scoops up ice cream from metal trays set into the table behind her. When the trays are empty, she must refill them by hauling them to the ice cream machine at the very right of the counter. This takes a few seconds, so don't get caught with a conveyor lined with half-completed treats and no ice cream!
Sometimes a solid gold ice cream cone will appear on the conveyor. Grab it because for every five you get, you have the chance to mix a new flavor of ice cream. This plays out like a "guess the number" type of game as you choose amounts of flavorings to add to vanilla ice cream. Coincidentally, "guess the number" was the first computer game I ever programmed. In an alternate universe, could I have written Anna's Ice Cream? If I had, I would have added a dogcatcher to rush in and scoop up those monkeys!
Anna's Ice Cream is a bit harder than the normal time management game, at least for me! There's a lot of things to keep track of as you advance through the island and the combinations of ice cream cones increase. I give the graphics in this game a big thumbs up. I like the character designs. However I give the background music one of those wavering sideways thumbs up/thumbs down combinations. You'll probably turn it down unless you're trying to prove some kind of sick and twisted point.
Some tips and hints to help Anna: bowls/jars of toppings must be picked up and put down each time, so whenever possible, wait to add them to more than one treat on the conveyor at once. Keep customers happy by feeding them cookies, lemonade, or having Molly do circus tricks for them. Always try to serve an entire table at the same time, for lots of extra tip money.
Once you reach the zoo in "story mode," you unlock "happy hour mode" which I would have called "in your face mode." One monkey stays at the zoo and customers line up at the counter.