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Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends Review for the Nintendo DS (NDS)

Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends Review for the Nintendo DS (NDS)

Today’s Secret Ingredient is… Escargot!

Cooking in real life may not always be easy or particularly enjoyable, but last year Cooking Mama for DS showed gamers the pleasures and pitfalls of virtual food preparation via crafty stylus-driven mini-games. You don’t have to be a marvel in the kitchen to get a kick out of concocting culinary creations with Mama. Despite some quirks, the original game left many players craving seconds.

Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends screenshot

In Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends you’ll get another heaping plateful of delicious delights, plenty of new recipes, kitchen customization, an excellent new play mode, and more. It improves slightly on the original design and offers enough new content to entice players to roll up their sleeves, pick up the stylus, and jump back into the kitchen.

Dinner with Friends is less of a sequel and more of an upgraded continuation of the same step-by-step food prep gameplay of Cooking Mama. For anyone who’s never stepped foot behind Mama’s counter, the concept of the game revolves around learning how to prepare numerous dishes while striving to do the best job possible in a lighthearted atmosphere (except when Mama’s eyes blaze red with unholy fire). You’ll create an extremely wide range of meals – everything from pizza and chilidogs to squid fried rice and even kimchi – by successfully completing a series of mini-games at each stage of the food preparation process. You’ll be chopping veggies, using food processors, pounding meat, mixing ingredients, filleting fish, cracking eggs and so forth. Only a handful of recipes are available from the start, but half of the thrill of cooking is seeing what new meals you’ll unlock when you perfect a dish. There are a total of 150 cooking mini-games and 80 new recipes to create.

Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends screenshot

In the main play mode, Mama will walk you through each step of a recipe with basic instructions. She’ll comment on your success at the end of each mini-game, and you’ll receive an overall grade for your dish once it’s completed. When digging into the first few recipes, it was difficult to stave off an initial feeling of disappointment at having to play some of the same exact cooking mini-games from the original game. If you take a moment to consider how actual cooking frequently requires performance of many of the same menial tasks from recipe-to-recipe, however, it does make sense. Still, the developers could have easily chosen to spice up or slightly change the visuals for carry-over tasks. After whipping up a few more recipes, these concerns were allayed once it became clear just how many new mini-games and neat tweaks were incorporated into Dinner with Friends. Those who have enjoyed the first Cooking Mama will still cringe when their least favorite tasks from the original rear their ugly head once more, but there’s more than enough variety to make up for it.

Easily the best addition, the new Let’s Cook mode has players cooking meals for Mama or one of her many friends who will taste your creations and render their judgment. Let’s Cook moves at a faster pace and leaves less room for error, offering advanced virtual chefs a more difficult challenge in the kitchen. Each cooking mini-game in a particular recipe is played one after another without pause or instruction. Failing any of the steps along the way will instantly render your meal inedible, and your dinner guest will be sure to let you know their thoughts on the matter. This mode flows smoothly and is a nice change over the more deliberate momentum of the traditional gameplay. A third mode, Cooking Contest, can either be played solo or with up to three other friends via single-card download play. Instead of cooking a complete dish, Cooking Contest has players competing in individual tasks to flex their kitchen skills. Cracking eggs, forming burgers, cutting corn off the cob, pouring liquid, grinding meat, slicing pasta, grilling with charcoal, and making crepes are among the many menial tasks you can compete in. Essentially, you’ll choose a single task and try to complete that action as many times as possible before the time runs out. It’s good practice if you need to brush up on your skills, yet it fails at providing a solid or fun multi-player experience.

Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends screenshot

In the first Cooking Mama, kind words from Mama were the only real reward for your efforts, aside from unlocking new recipes. A far more elaborate reward system was incorporated into Dinner with Friends to make budding chefs feel good about their creations when they truly nail the recipe precisely. A perfect score is rewarded with a spray of hearts and flowers accompanied by a musical fanfare and Mama’s praise.

Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends screenshot

The voice over work for Mama is pretty funny as it’s barely intelligible English spoken in a thick Japanese accent. Completing recipes with a high score will often unlock new recipes in addition to sweet rewards including new outfits and accessories for Mama, new backdrops for the kitchen, and new utensils, among others. Additionally, completing steps with perfect accuracy at a high speed will give you a bonus. At the end of each dish your bonus is calculated and a colorful gift is unlocked for every five stars you receive.

The stylus controls in the original Cooking Mama were never as tight as they should have been which led to moments of irritation. It’s too bad Dinner with Friends doesn’t solve all of those problems. Though it’s truly hard to tell, it does at least feel like minor improvements to touch controls were made in Dinner with Friends (at least in some areas). There are still certain mini-games where controls feel awkward or unresponsive. For example, it should not be this tough to simply strain pasta without having water go flying in all directions. The same goes for filling containers with custard or trying to smoothly shape meat into hamburgers.

Arranging items in your own fridge at home may not be very easy (depending on whether you’ve cleaned out the two-year old science experiments), but it shouldn’t be such a pain to move a few things around in order to stick a fruit mold in to chill since Mama’s fridge is way tidier. In general, the controls function efficiently during the bulk of the games, but when they are not very responsive it can be pretty frustrating. Thankfully, the glut of excellent recipes and new cooking mini-games makes this issue less bothersome than in the first game. It’s easy to look beyond the few troublesome tasks as they are often over rather quickly.

Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends screenshot

Cooking Mama is an acquired taste. If you enjoyed the original, then you’ll easily get a huge amount of play from Dinner with Friends. The new recipes alone are well worth the time, and throwing in many new steps and rewards freshens the gameplay. There aren’t a lot of major changes to the original formula. At its core, it’s essentially the same game only a bit better. If you missed Cooking Mama the first time around it’s best to skip the appetizers and go right for the main course with Dinner with Friends. You won’t regret it.

Features:

  • Use the stylus as your ultimate cooking utensil to chop, grate, slice, stir, spread, sprinkle, roll, and much more in 150 different mini-games.
  • Create 80 new recipes including: macaroons, lobster, chili dogs, escargot, California rolls, seafood salad, shark fin soup, meatloaf, ice cream, bananas foster, and more.
  • Four gameplay modes including new additions to the series.

    RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.7 Graphics
    Bright and colorful visuals. Mini-games are the same visual style, but transitions, backgrounds, and menus have been updated. 3.2 Control
    Slightly better stylus controls than the original. There are still some kinks which need working out. 3.4 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
    Bouncy, upbeat music and silly voice-overs do the trick. 3.7

    Play Value
    The new recipes, bonus extras, and additional gameplay mode will keep you busy in short-but-fun bursts of cooking bliss.

    3.7 Overall Rating – Good
    Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

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