Another Video Game Dream

I had another video game dream last night.  Okay, I dream about video games a lot, but they’re usually either based on real games, or just generic zombie games. 

The game I dreamed about last night was like a cross between Final Fight and Tapper.  The game was probably inspired by the recently released “River City Girls” game, because the main characters were teenage girls in school uniforms.  Like most of my video game dreams, my point of view would switch back and forth, from being a character in the game, to playing the game on a TV with a controller.

In this game, you walk through the streets, getting in fist fights with gang members.  So far, that describes half the games Capcom made in the 90s.  However, you’re also pushing a food cart.  It’s about the size of a hot dog cart, but full of cupcakes.  Your character parks the cart by the sidewalk, and customers start lining up.  You have to serve each customer, occasionally putting cakes in the cart’s little built-in oven.

Meanwhile, gang members walk up and start harassing your customers, so you have to beat them up (the gang members, not the customers).  If you ignore the gang members, they harass and scare off the customers.  But if you spend too much time beating up the gang members, your customers starting leaving because they had to wait too long.  If you forget to put more cakes in the oven now and then, you run out of cakes and more customers leave.  If the oven timer goes off, you only have a certain amount of time to get the cupcakes out of the oven before they burn.

Like any Final Fight style game, once you beat up a certain number of gang members (or in this case maybe sell a certain number of cakes), an arrow flashes “GO” for a few seconds, your character pushes the cart down the street to the next stopping point, and the whole process starts over.  When I played with two players, there was still only one cart, but there were twice as many customers and gang members.  But I think there was also a competitive mode where you each had your own cart.

Some customers would stand at the cart for a few seconds making up their mind.  I don’t remember the exact “serving” controls, but I think it was pretty simple.  Just make sure you’re standing at the counter when a customer is ready to order, and press a button to serve them.  The serving and paying animations took a couple of seconds, so you really had to manage your time between serving, fighting, and baking.

I also vaguely remember a bonus level that involved decorating the cakes, which reminded me a little of Overcooked.