Cooking Mama 2 : Dinner with Friends

Rating Everyone Genre action Publisher Majesco External Links Official Cooking Mamma Website

When ever have the subjects of cooking on the Nintendo DS and Engrish come together to form a beautiful combination platter with a side of slicing, dicing, and stirring? Well, not since Cooking Mama poked its original and creative head out among the dueling likes of competing Mario Bros. titles and rampaging Nintendogs. And now Mama’s back and she brought her BIG Book of recipes with her. So grab a spatula, fire up the skillet, and preheat the oven cause now your cooking with friends.

Cooking Mama 2 isn’t a direct clone of its older sister. This little lady’s triumphant return is heralded by eighty, count them, EIGHTY new recipes, as well as the bevy of presents a player can win in-between recipes. These new brightly packaged mystery boxes are awarded to the player who gets five bonuses at any time. For each five, the player is presented with three presents, one of which is empty, the others hiding some kind of reward from Mama for your hard work. These can be anything from a new colored counter-top to a friends face to paste on your Kimchi platter.

A returning champion to Mama’s Kitchen Stadium is the exhausting Cooking contest. These can be either performed in solo challenge mode or with your friends wirelessly. The solo challenge mode pits the player against time and tests the endurance of your stylus work, as each challenge is a skill learned in the games single player mode. Slicing veggies, peeling potatoes, and making ground meat for speed are all challenges that can be tested and bested.

All of your favorite or least favorite challenges will reemerge throughout Cooking Mama 2. Cracking eggs, not burning the onions, and hand fanning the broquettes have all come back to cheer your success or mock your failure. Other fun and difficult new recipes like Bananas Foster, Escargot, and the ever-difficult bagel are among the mountain of foodstuffs that will become available for your culinary skill to attempt. The trial of homemade peanut butter and some of the more acquired tastes like the looming and unattempted Mayonnaise Shrimp will await you... if you dare.

The main menu in Cooking Mama 2 will offer the classic Cook with Mama option as well as Let’s Cook, and Change Design. The Let’s Cook feature allows your player to prepare the same meals Mama has taught you, only allowing you to serve it to one of your in game friends. The new judge will evaluate your dish and give you certain bonuses and unlock new characters for you to perform for as you progress. The Change Design menu allows the player to change what Mama wears as well as how the kitchen looks. Each surface and utensil can be colored and styled. This give Mama’s drab old kitchen a personal touch from you, the player. Mama can get up to ten different outfits with accessories like new glasses, jewelry, and the like. Another fun aspect of Cooking Mama 2 is the new photo diary, which is stored on the DS and can be shown to friends wirelessly. These pictures are saved after each successful cooking session. Any of these photos can be altered by selecting their frames, adding faces, silly symbols, speech bubbles, and an entire slew of unlockable bits.

While the game won’t get you a degree from the Culinary Institute of America, it may just give the chef in you a little more creativity when considering what to do with that Mac and Cheese or de Peanut Butter au Jelly sammich. Cooking Mama 2 : Dinner with Friends offers even more of the time-slaughtering iron chef-esque action than its predecessors, but not much in the realm of knocking our proverbial kitchen aprons off. While this title will give you exactly what you were expecting, that’s about where it stops. All the fun is there, as well as the festive and vibrant colors. Mix that up with a little customization and the occasional bit of unlockable content, and you’ve got a recipe for success. But more recipes does necessarily equal more fun, so come hungry for Cooking Mama 2, but not starving.