 Review By: Siou Choy |
Developer: | Office Create |
| Publisher: | Majesco | |
| Genre: | Simulation | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1-4 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | DS Download Play | |
| Buy Now: |   |
Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends, as you may have gathered from the title, is a sequel to the popular Cooking Mama which once again leaves the enterprising gamer to display their skills at slicing and dicing with the best of them. Of course, when the best of them includes the likes of trollish Emeril Lagasse, short, fat and irritating Rachael Ray, the cardiovascularly afflicted Two Fat Ladies and Julia Child (RIP to both), Asian “uncle tom” Martin Yan and the extremely annoying Bobby Flay, that’s really not saying much…
There are about 80 recipes for you to try your hand at this time around, with an additional option to cook for particular victims…er, guests and force them to judge your culinary skills. So if you don’t trust that empty-headed, ever-grinning cheshire cat “Mama” with her crack-glazed eyes, you get to inflict your kitchen mishaps on some other virtual sucker...
As you complete recipes and earn bonuses you’re given the option to “change Mama’s appearance”. No, that doesn’t mean you can make her look like your very own “mama”, or even make any significant alterations to her physique and appearance, but you do get to make her sport a monocle. All she needs is a pair of jodhpurs and a riding crop, and the image is complete! Of course, if you happen to lean a bit towards Queer Eye or ever heard yourself described as “metrosexual” (the horror!), you might find yourself in an absolute tizzy over that pink polka-dot chiffon she’s wearing, and just have to change it to a warm chartreuse…the rest of us probably don’t give a sh**, so this is a decidedly minor sales point…
Speaking of Mama, her voice is a bit disturbing the first dozen or so times you hear it (not an option in the original). At first I thought she was a bit…uh…developmentally disabled, but after a bit, I decided it was just some typically mangled ‘Japlish’, as they call it over that way. Needless to say, it takes a little while to get used to her garbled, consonant-challenged stroke victim “English”, but now I find that I just can’t picture the game without it. You might even wind up imitating her bizarre patois yourself, in direct correlation to just how punchy you are at time of gameplay.
Posted: 2007-12-30 13:26:37 PST