Cooking Mama 2: Dinner With Friends Review

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(More customer reviews)The Cooking Mama series can do no wrong by me. These are near perfect games because you get exactly what you're expecting, and then some. As the title suggests, Cooking Mama 2 is a cooking game with 80 recipes from around the world, including favorites like kimchee and pancakes. You prepare food in steps, with Mama giving you helpful hints and scores along the way. The over-the-top cutesy graphics and intuitive gameplay make this a favorite with kids, but there's finesse involved that even adults will find frustrating. These games are perfect for the Achiever in your life, and Cooking Mama 2 pushes the idea further, adding unlockable customizations to your kitchen and Mama's wardrobe.

The most impressive feature of the Cooking Mama titles are their utilization of Nintendo hardware. Cooking Mama 2 continues to caress the DS with innovative stylus play. Move your stylus around a meat grinder's handle to make it go. Crack an egg by drawing a line to the bowl - slowly, or you'll wind up with egg on your hand. Blow into the microphone to ensure a pot of boiling water won't boil over. There are several dozen different mechanics available, and most of them are easy to grasp, but difficult to master. Most of the preparation requires that you beat the clock, but if you chop without stopping, or pull a piece of meat out of the frier at just the right moment, you can receive bonuses. This makes basic gameplay a snap, and advanced gameplay an ART.

After you've unlocked some recipes, you can cook for Mama's friends. Mama won't give you hints on what you should do, but since you've worked through the recipe at least once, you won't need hints. As a result, preparing food for Mama's friends is a much speedier process, and the rewards or penalties are greater. If you mess up when you're cooking for Mama's friends, Mama's not there to help you and your preparation is cut short before you can finish. If you do well, you receive presents and can unlock special items for customizing your game.

You can customize Mama's dress, accessories, the appearance of her kitchen, and the color of all the kitchen utensils you use in the game. There are 10 dress types (with several color options each), 5 accessories, and 5 kitchen settings to unlock. I like customizing everything to match to an unnatural degree, but many players will love dressing up Mama in wacky lemon earrings and strange cheerleader outfits. Not every friend you impress will unlock an item - sometimes the presents are just nice things to look at that don't stay in your game, like a kitten or a treasure chest.

As with previous releases, you can practice any part of a recipe, and set records for yourself in specific preparation techniques. Both Cooking Mama 1 and 2 for the DS offer wireless play, so you can challenge your friends to an egg-cracking contest. This isn't as cool as Cooking Mama Cookoff for the Wii, where you can execute an entire recipe against friends, but there's still something very appealing about proclaiming yourself the Queen of the Deep Fryer and laying the smackdown in an egg-cracking competition.

There are a few annoying parts of the game. Bonuses are now meaningful - each one you get earns you one star out of 5, and for every 5 stars, you get a present. But the presents aren't unlocked items, they're just cute graphic rewards. Calculating these bonuses takes a lot of time, and the accompanying music is very loud. It's nice that the bonuses have some kind of reward, but I'd prefer points or records to an overkill of praise. Some of the mechanics are still a little too hard to master. I find stewing and simmering to be a pain, because you have to wait for the food the food to cook until it's reached the green part of the progress meter, but you also have to control temperature and stir - not too often - to make sure the food doesn't pass the green sweet spot on the meter and remains exactly there until time is up. Adjusting the temperature of the stove and stirring will wildly change the food's progress meter, so it's very difficult to do with respect to the timer.

This is not my favorite Cooking Mama title, but the improvements significantly enhance the replay value and enjoyability of the game. Within a release or two, this game will be perfect, deadly addictive, and completely free of design flaws. Let's hope the world doesn't run out of interesting recipes in the mean time!

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Product Description:
Hot on the heels of her award-winning debut title's sales success, Mama returns to the kitchen with new recipes, ingredients and friends in Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends. Think your dishes are delicious? This time, only your hungry friends will be the judge of that!

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