Mochi ice cream, peppered beef jerky, seaweed wrapped rice crackers, Pocky, sour watermelon gummies, thin buttery almond cookies...yumm. If you know me, then you know I love my snacks. Former coworkers have labeled me the “Snack Queen” and, lately, I’ve been transferring this love of food to the DS.

I’m sure most of you have heard about the first one - Cooking Mama. If you’re not familiar with Asian food, this might be a weird one for you, but if you’re like me, playing this game gets me super hungry. Using your stylus, you chop green onions, slice octopus, and bread and fry shrimp tempura, for example. You also actually get to cook the food, which involves blowing on the DS to cool it down, stir frying, boiling, and adding ingredients when you’re supposed to. Each recipe gives you a rating, but in order to get the gold, you have to do everything perfectly. Who knew cooking rice could be so hard?

Then there is Cake Mania. I was inspired to play this because of my love for desserts. This ridiculously addictive (but sometimes difficult) game brings together multitasking, logic, and memorizing skills. You work in a bakery and every month of the year is a “level” where customers come in, tell you what kind of cake you want, and you make it. Making a cake is just a matter of using the stylus to pick the shape of the cake and the color of the icing. Your ultimate goal is buy back your grandfather’s bakery and as the game progresses, your orders get more complex (double decker cakes!) so there are lots of different cake combos and cake toppings. You also get impatient customers, which you can calm by giving cupcakes to or you can distract them by changing the TV to their favorite channel. And the faster you serve them, the more tips you’ll get. With this money, you get to upgrade your oven, your icing machine (would that be called the icer?) and other fancy gadgets in your kitchen. Although this sounds pretty simple, making your monetary goal for the month can sometimes be frustrating and take multiple tries. You are constantly busy and you can’t make your character go any faster than walking speed so even when you’re working at full speed, sometimes you just can’t go through enough customers to make your goal. And because you’re working on such a small scale, one accidental tap of the stylus and that cake goes will go to waste. I actually wouldn’t have come across and played this game in its entirety if I wasn’t looking for this next game I’m going to talk about…

Which leads me to...Diner Dash! This game is very similar to Cake Mania where you’re always serving customers, making sure they’re always happy and not waiting too long, but where Cake Mania is focused on remembering what kind of cake/color/topping the customer ordered, Diner Dash focuses on how efficient you are and how fast you can get your customers in and out the door - it is a diner, don’t forget. Where Cake Mania tries to have fancy graphics that look like they’re from the SNES, Diner Dash was originally a Flash game so it’s simple cartoony graphics work. Diner Dash is also more fast-paced, causing my eyes to water tremendously because I feel like I’m going to miss something if I blink.

All three are great games for the DS and can be fast enough to get some good gameplay in, even if you only have 5 minutes. Ok, now I’m officially hungry again…