One of the most appealing aspects of video games is the opportunity to experience an entirely different life from the one you currently live. Rockstar's GTA series lets you experience life's seamy underbelly, Electronic Arts' recent Lord of the Rings games let you roll through Middle-earth like a conquering hero, and SquareSoft's Final Fantasy games all let you experience what it would be like if everyone had big hair and rode enormous chickens, to name just a few recent examples of the breadth of experience available to gamers. But, varied as those experiences are, they pale in comparison to Success' recently released PlayStation 2 import, Yoshinoya. If you've ever dared to dream of living the fast-paced lifestyle of a fast-food employee in Japan, your time has come. Success' game puts you on the daily emotional roller coaster that only a member of the food-services workforce could ever experience.

The goal of the game is to feed as many patrons as possible as fast as you can.

For the unwashed masses unfamiliar with the game and the Yoshinoya Corporation, allow us to bring you up to speed. Yoshinoya is a company that was founded over a century ago in Japan and that has built an empire around the simple pleasures of a bowl of rice with some thinly sliced beef and onion on top. The chain of reasonably priced foodstuffs has expanded from a family-run store, which opened in a fish market in Nihonbashi, Chuo-ky, Tokyo, in 1899, to more than 1,000 stores worldwide as of 2001. Having conquered the food sector over the last few decades, the chain has set its sights on the video game world with the help of Japanese developer Success and the simply titled Yoshinoya for the PlayStation 2.

So how on earth could a game even hope to capture the essence of such a company in playable form? Surprisingly easily. If you've ever played the classic game Root Beer Tapper, you'll have a small sense of what Success has done. You'll take the role of a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed trainee at a Yoshinoya store who must work his way up through the ranks of the apron-and-hat-wearing set to be the best employee to ever seat a customer, pour tea, prepare a bowl, and shout "Arigato gozaimashita!"

When you start the game you'll have only two servers to choose from, but you can eventually unlock more as you progress. Once you've selected your character, you'll come to a menu screen that shows a 3D representation of the store you'll be manning for that particular level. You'll have to work through three shifts--morning, noon, and night--whose difficulty is rated by the number of beef bowls next to the name. Once you've completed your third shift, you'll "face off" against a lone customer in a boss-fight-style sequence. If you manage to please the customer with your skills, you'll be able to move on to another store and an even greater challenge.

At the end of each shift, you have to wage a "boss fight" to please a single customer.

The gameplay breaks down into two distinct types over the course of serving beef bowls. The serving sequences during your three shifts are pretty basic. You'll guide your character behind the counter as customers come in and sit down. When you near them you'll see the type of bowl they're looking for, represented by a thought bubble displaying one of the four face buttons on the PlayStation 2 controller. You'll just have to press the corresponding button to serve them a bowl and send them on their way. Each level will have its own requirements for success, usually revolving around serving a certain number of customers in an uninterrupted chain. This gets to be challenging as the stores you man get larger and the customers get more impatient. If you take too long to serve a customer, the customer will stomp out in a huff and knock the onscreen chain counter back to zero. To add insult to injury, walkouts will also lower the onscreen customer-happiness meter. While this may sound a bit simplistic, there's actually a little bit of depth thrown in. You'll be able to direct customers where to sit, and you can create combos by grouping together customers craving the same kind of bowl. Serving one of the customers in the chain feeds the whole lot of them and adds more time to the game clock, which is always running down. The bigger the group, the more time is added and the more dramatic the effect used to underscore your combo.