Every once in a while, I play a game that makes me abhor this practice of labeling games as casual or hardcore. This is especially true when it becomes apparent that these words are a meaningless way to put down anything that doesn’t contain ridiculously large machine guns. Usually this debate enters my mind while playing a Nintendo or Popcap game, but over the past week, Diner Dash has made me do a bit of thinking.

You can see where I’m going with this, but let me go ahead and make what will probably be a controversial statement. Diner Dash is every bit as complicated as your hardcore games and players that come close to mastering it are freaking ninjas.

Before I get into that, let’s go over the mechanics. Some of this may sound familiar. You have probably played either Diner Dash itself or one of its myriad clones. You’re Flo. Flo is on a vacation and gets recruited to run the cruise ship’s restaurant. You have a friend there to cook for you, but the rest is a one-woman show. You have to direct guests to open tables (match their shirt color to the seat color to get a score bonus). At the appropriate times, you need to take their orders, bring them food, collect their cash, clean up the dishes, and mop up spills. While you do this, the patience of your customers (both seated and in line) continues to drop. If their patience bottoms out, they’re gone (for where is a mystery, it’s not like they can go to the other restaurant on the boat).

Satisfy enough customers to pass a score threshold and you’re gold. Fail and you need to repeat the entire level again. That’s basically it, other than a few new quirks later on. As you progress through the levels, you’ll get to upgrade your equipment, expand your restaurant, and unlock new outfits. You’ll even open up new restaurants as you rise in the oceanic restaurant industry. Of course, the customers will also get harder and harder to deal with as your own skills improve. They’re patience will run out more quickly, you’ll have to match the right number of customers to a table, and some will bring babies (which have their own set of complications).

Flo on the Go is the latest DS release of the franchise, so everything is stylus-based. The controls are fine. I didn’t really have any problems with the precision, which can be an issue with DS games. I actually can’t imagine playing this game on the Xbox (or any system without some mouse-like input). You need to quickly move your pointer, which is fine when you have a stylus. Once in a while, I would have trouble making customers “stick” to a table, but that was about the only problem. The other reason that this game works on the DS is that it really is a game perfectly suited to a portable platform. Each level is limited to five to ten minutes, and I pretty rarely wanted to binge on it. Diner Dash is a great game to pull out on the bus or in the bathroom. You can dive in, play one level, and get on with your day.

Back to that hardcore part - Diner Dash is a hard game. By the seventh level or so, I was regularly failing for my first few tries of every stage. The mechanics sound simple, and they are simple. You’ll learn everything you really need to know in the first set of levels. The actual application of these mechanics is where you’ll stumble. It’s the old adage - easy to learn, difficult to master. Like all of the great NES games that inspired the phrase, Diner Dash captures that primal experience of crushing you until you succeed. When you have a dozen full tables of customers at various stages in their meals with a line out of the proverbial door, you need both lightning-quick reflexes and a keen attention to detail to reign in all of the chaos. To the developer’s credit, the game is just addictive enough to make you try and try until you pass. You can practice and memorize patterns until you find some optimal placement, and then you’ll win! Laugh at the “casual players” if you want, but this is the exact same thing that you and I did to beat Mega Man 2 back in elementary school.

I’m actually pretty thankful that they didn’t try to shove much of a story down your throat because, honestly, the art direction is pretty bad. Really, though, it’s the gameplay that is important in games like these, and Diner Dash gets that right. I wasn’t overwhelmingly excited when the game arrived in my mailbox, but I grew more curious when one of the other staffers praised the thing. Now, I can see exactly why. Diner Dash is an addictive, difficult game that challenges some of the industry’s preconceived (and bogus) notions of casual versus hardcore and, while this isn’t really the place to have that debate, I’m glad that the game kicked it into the limelight (well, my limelight anyways).

Official Website (with a demo of the PC/Mac versions)