 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: |   |
Recipes are broken down into several steps, with an explanation from “Mama” of what to do in each step. Upon completion of each dish, she’ll let you know how well you did in preparing the food. Once the item of choice has been fully cooked, you’re given a score to see how well your food was received. Bonuses can be earned to obtain extra items and new recipes. You can also customize your kitchen and the utensils to your liking (someone must have been really anal over at Majesco, given all the minutiae you can customize – again, as with “Mama”, there’s really no significant alterations involved – aesthetically speaking, any changes are at the level of pure nitpicking).
Cooking Mama’s first release garnered rave reviews for its prevalent and creative use of the stylus, an otherwise underutilized (if not utterly misused) option of the Nintendo DS, and its sequel adheres closely to that winning formula. Whether chopping food, stirring broths and icings, or flipping foodstuffs in a frying pan, kitchen-minded gamers will find plenty of stylus based interaction in preparation of their culinary concoctions. Even the microphone gets its moment in the sun, when you get to blow into it to cool down certain crockery based confections.
Graphically speaking, there’s not much to speak of, but this is to be expected from a game designed for a handheld platform. The game’s bright colors and super-deformed characters add to its appeal.
Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends isn’t all that far removed from the original. In fact, Dinner with Friends represents more of an extension of the original Cooking Mama as opposed to an actual sequel. But now that we’ve got that out of the way, we come to the real bottom line: does it really matter, when the game is so offbeat and enjoyable?
Bottom Line:
Let’s boil this down to basics: I really enjoyed Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends. Of course you should keep in mind the fact that I love most quirky offerings out there in video game land, be they cute and offbeat or dark and gothic. In terms of the former category, this one definitely fits the bill, so I’m happy. Speaking more objectively, if you played the first Cooking Mama, you won’t find much of a difference between the two offerings in the series – but if you’re working from two positives, isn’t that a good thing?
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 7.5 |
Posted: 2007-12-30 13:26:37 PST