A friend once whinged to me about why he hated Grand Theft Auto IV. His problem was that he couldn't get past the fact that they'd taken the comical and the exaggerated out of its formula and replaced these key, popular elements with reality. He further argued that if he wanted to drive down the street to grab a burger, or to take a girl out to dinner that he could do that in real life and didn't find it entertaining that he could do this from the comfort of his living room lounge. My friend would hate Fast Food Panic. I think it's flat out one of the most fun games to hit the Wii in a long while.

Fast Food Panic sees you take on the real life job of operating a restaurant, from greeting patrons as they enter your restaurant, to taking orders and cooking their meals as well as tidying up around the place. Our demonstration started a few levels into the game and quite quickly it became obvious that we'd skipped all of the tutorial levels and were thrown into the thick of it.

Things start off slow as you shake the Nunchuck to greet the customers entering your premises. You switch from the kitchen to the dining area to take your customer's order and switch back to the chef to start making their burgers, pizza, pasta or one of the many dishes (Some of which weren't available in the demo we saw) that will be available upon the game's release later this year. From here it starts to get a little hectic, and a whole lot addictive.

Fast Food Panic takes full advantage of the Wii's motion sensing controls and is intuitive as to which actions you need to perform to roll out your dough or flip your burgers. And it needs to be. Before long orders will start to pile up and you'll be putting on pasta for one order, then switching to the next to prepare your pizza and back again so you're not burning anything. You'll slash the Wii-mote to slice your pizza and pinch the buttons on your controller to pick up and place ingredients where they need to go. Overcook your meals and you'll need to start again forcing your customers to wait - and wait they won't.

Eventually you'll be managing five or six orders, shaking your nunchuck as you hear people enter, taking their orders and occasionally be interrupted to participate in some of the mini games Fast Food Panic requires you to do to build your score. Optional tasks like picking up the trash in the carpark or tallying patron's bills are thrown at you to keep your blood pressure high and your score even higher.

Keeping things consistent with the Wii's party game stigma there's a two player co-op mode that has the potential to be a whole lot of fun, though we didn't see it in the demonstration. Fast Food Panic is also available on the DS and trades the Wii's motion sensing controls for touch screen controls.

The name of the game here is stress and Fast Food Panic does a surprising job of keeping your attention firmly focused on your screen without making you too overwhelmed. My friend would ask me why I would waste my time virtually doing something that could probably do in real life and I would reply, "Because I play videogames, dude. That's just the way it is."