Atomic Ape's Tiny Gourmet offers text-based farming on go

While iPhone isn't without its fair share of farming and cooking games, Atomic Ape's Tiny Gourmet offers a combination of both of those genres, presented in a Mafia Wars-style text format. The game's various menus offer you individual farms where you can grow ingredients that can later be used to cook fabulous dishes, on top of stores where you can purchase ingredients outright or sell your excess products.

Different ingredients take different amounts of time to grow and cost different amounts of coins as well, as you might expect. You'll need to spend some of your profits to have additional farm plots, increasing your overall productivity, and will be able to complete gourmet collections by cooking culturally themed dishes based on country. For instance, you'll start with the Italian catalog of dishes, cooking items like Biscotti or Minestrone Soup by growing individual plots of wheat or tomatoes, as one example.

Even though the game is almost entirely text-based (save for a few small images of crops or cooking tools), you'll still be able to travel the globe, cooking in locations that are appropriate for the dishes themselves. In our above Italian example, you'll be able to plant and harvest crops at the foot of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for instance.

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While Tiny Gourmet may seem like it's a step backwards in the realm of realism in gaming, it's an interesting take on the cooking and farming genres and is now free to download on iPhone (unfortunately the game isn't available natively on the iPad, as of this writing).

Click here to download Tiny Gourmet on iTunes -->

Will you try Tiny Gourmet on iPhone, or do you prefer your games to be more modern, rather than classic and text-based? Sound off in the comments.