AQWBlaZer91's First Impressions: Cooking Mama 4 Demo

Game Title: Cooking Mama 4

Platform: Nintendo 3DS

Genre: Simulation, Mini Games

Developer: Cooking Mama Limited

Publisher: 505 Games

Demo Released: January 19th 2012 (Europe)

Date of Full Game Release: November 25th 2011 (Europe)

Age Rating: 3+ PEGI

The Cooking Mama series has done it's cooking quite decently well for casual gamers on the DS and the Wii alongside spinoffs like Babysitting Mama, Gardening Mama and Camping Mama.

In this demo you've got 30 uses before it expires.

In the Cooking Mama 4 Demo you've got to make the pizza to impress Mama. You start the demo with Sieving the flour into the bowl, mixing the ingredients together, kneading the dough, stretching the dough so that it's thin enough without using the rolling pin, opening the can of tomato sauce, spreading the tomato sauce over the pizza, adding the cheese on top along with the lettuce and finally put 5 pizzas in the oven. Each of these minigames are very brief and after you complete each minigame you score is totaled by a percentage that depends how you performed on each stage with either a Bronze, Sliver or a Gold.

If you played any of the previous Cooking Mama games on the DS then you'll most likely will be familiar with the games control scheme. The minigames can only controlled on the Touch Screen with the Stylus while Mama's face and Timer being shown on the Top Screen.

Now for how the minigames work. In the sieving minigame you use the stylus to tap both sides to sieve the flour into the bowl but you have to keep the sieve balanced or the flour will spill. It happens to be the worst of the minigames cause whenever you spill the flour you have to try to scribble the screen in order to clear your view, sometimes the touch controls doesn't work so you'll have pray that it works or just wait for the time to run out.

The rest of the minigames do fair better, in the mixing minigame the Touch Screen controls the mixing and when the game prompts you to stop mixing to add the ingredients, you stop otherwise it will spill in your face before you continue mixing again. Chances are that unless you viewing the screen from the right perspective you might miss the message if your hand is covering the warning message.

In the Dough kneading minigame you slide the Dough to knead it and also slam it down on the ground but however you need to slide carefully when slamming. It's fun to play through but sometimes the controls don't pick up properly.

In the Dough Stretching minigame the Stylus is used in circles stretches out the Dough until a meter fills up so that allows you to toss the Dough up in the air and back into your hand again. The funny part is that also you can accidentally throw the Dough into Mamas face.

In the Can Opening minigame you have to gently slide the Stylus up and down on the Cap Opener so that you don't cause any accidents. You'll might screw up easily by sliding too quickly so whenever that happens you'll have to restart with a new can and you'll probably won't have the time to get that correct if you've screwed up the last can.

In Sauce Spreading you simply spread the sauce all over the Dough so that it's fully covered up nicely. It's very simple if I must say.

The best of the minigames is the Cheese tossing game called Add it! What you do in it is you tap on the cheese so that it tosses them into the mixture. You got to master your timing to get them all there.

Tear up the leaves is another weak link of this minigame collection. What you have to do is pick out the leaves in the correct order but however the game tells the order that you must pick before the level properly starts which makes it difficult to memorize them.

Lastly there's the minigame where you got to put the Pizza into the wood oven by gently sliding the Stylus as indicated so that you'll get at least 5 Pizzas inside carefully.

Cooking Mama looked quite well done on the Original DS but however on the 3DS there really isn't much use of the 3D effects besides Mamas stance with the background but otherwise this is a game that is more or less built for the Original DS with the way the graphics look. The voice acting for Mama is poorly delivered and sadly I wish there was an option for the original Japanese voice track.

Although it's quite fun for casual gamers but some other gamers like myself will say that this game doesn't make much changes to the formula and sadly the demo doesn't reveal ay features in the full game. If you want to know more maybe you'll have to look at other Internet Gaming pages. As for me I think I'll let my Mama do all the Cooking for me.

Although it's pointless for me to post my first impressions playing the demo due to the game's already out but I'm doing this to show off my opinions on playing it.

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Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)