Game update: 29/01/14

Our second Valentine's Day update should keep chocolate lovers happy!

Notification for latest Valentine's Day update

That's because chocolate is the subtheme, although only just as most of the items are general Valentine's gear. Here's the comprehensive list of new content:

Tables:

• Chocolate - 2 gems

Chairs:

• Chocolate - 6,500 coins

Wall decorations:

• Valentine Menu - 6 gems

Floor decorations:

• Rose Column - 9 gems
• Kissing Booth - 17 gems
• Valentine Fountain - 42 gems (LTO)

Wallpapers:

• Heart - 5,900 coins

Counters:

• Chocolate - 28,000 coins

There's also a new addition to the Basic Stove. Let's start with it:

New recipe on Basic Stove

The Chocolate Kiss is currently at the front of the recipe list, but will move in a couple of weeks. There's also a chance it will be removed at some stage if TeamLava choose to do a Valentine's Day content removal, so get those mastery gems as soon as you can!

Looking at the stats, this is a rotten recipe. The 34 XP is among the lowest in the 2 hour bracket, while the numbers for profit and portions are very ordinary. If you're adamant about cooking a 2 hour dish I'd point you in the direction of the NY Strip Steak, which is proper quality.

But if you're free over the two hour period, then you may consider preparing a 1 hour recipe twice. There are several which yield more profit when cooked twice than the Chocolate Kiss does from one helping while the Thick Cut Bacon once again deserves mention for its 61 XP for just one helping. So you can earn close to four times the XP from making it twice as you can from making the chocolates once!

 Valentine's Day 2014

 22/01/14 Cupid update

In other recipe news, the Pretzel Twist from the Twisted update has been uprooted. You'll now find it close to the end of the recipe list under the Basic Oven, between Pork and Persimmons and Rack of Lamb.

Let's turn our attention to the items included in this lovey-dovey update. Once again there's a limited time offer, the Valentine Fountain.

Valentine Fountain limited time offer

This 3x3 piece is located on the 11th page of the floor decoration tab (10 taps of the right arrow) in between the Pinwheel Dance and Maypole for some bizarre reason. Presumably it's an error which will be rectified shortly. Here's a glimpse of the fountain on my floor:

Valentine Fountain

It's a fine enough decoration, but won't be on my wish list as I've already got the Kissing Swans from 2013 which I paid a premium for, and is both bigger and better in my book. However this will still make a strong centrepiece for some romantic restaurants this Valentine's Day.

Staying with the floor decor, the Kissing Booth is a candidate for the weirdest item I've ever seen. After all, who wants to kiss a dog? And moreover who wants to pay 50 cents to kiss a dog? I'd be tempted if I was being paid 50 million coins for it (the expansions would be rolling out!) but overall this is a very strange one which I'll definitely be passing on.

The other new floor decoration is the Rose Column. In my opinion this is a case of a great idea being poorly executed. A pillar with roses twisting their way up sounds an excellent idea. But when we compare the proportions of this column to the existing columns in the game something goes awry:

Comparison of Rose Column with Modern Asian Column

As you can see, the Rose Column is both shorter and narrower than the Modern Asian Column (and the Wooden Pillar). If it wasn't for this I'd be seriously contemplating a purchase of four to flank my main section, even at nine gems each.

Let's get to the chocolate content. The Chocolate table and Chocolate chair are quite simple in design, but still look pretty cool. One look at them leaves me drooling for a bite out of a rich bar of dark chocolate! Despite this positivity, I do struggle to see how they can fit into any theme - they don't exactly go with your traditional Valentine's decor. They'd actually be a good fit in Bakery Story where there's loads of foody pieces already.

The Chocolate counter suffers with the same problem, but again it looks the part. In addition to that smooth chocolate, the counter includes part of the wrapper peeled away at the bottom - a fine touch.

Unlike the chocolate things, the Heart wallpaper is just what you'd expect for Valentine's Day. Lots of shades of pink, heart-shaped balloons and an elegant finish, all for a decent price. A vast improvement on last week's dismal Cupid wallpaper. And even better, we can hang a Valentine Menu on the wall. This wall decoration costs six gems, but appears to be a traditional restaurant blackboard which lists the day's specials. It's great to get a 'normal' restaurant item once in a while. I might buy this one and display it somewhere all year round!

Now I'd like to address all Android players. Last week a special edition of the game was released on Google Play.

Valentine's Day edition for Android

To get hold of all of last week's content you need to download this seasonal version. I assume the same is probably true of this week's update too. On Monday Androiders got the chance to earn six gems for downloading the Valentine's Day edition, so it's definitely worth doing!

It appears that such an app update isn't going to happen for iOS. That's a real shame as I used to love getting the bots dressed up for the occasion (whichever it was). But at least everyone across both platforms is getting access to all the new content one way or another.

The other thing which is missing are Valentine's goals. I'm still confident of such goals being released, but with only two more Wednesdays until the 14th of February, we're running out of time to get them. I reckon next week might be the goal update though, as it brings us within a few days of the expiry date of the Chinese New Year goals. And recently new goals have come a week before the previous set expired. We'll see!