Cooking Mama 2 Dinner With Friends Ds Views

• General Goods

In Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends, players use the stylus as the ultimate kitchen utensil in 150 different cooking mini-games across 80 new recipes that range from cultural delicacies like shark fin soup to the all-American apple pie. However, this time around players actually have hungry mouths to feed since nine finicky dinner friends will be tasting and judging each meal. A new Challenge Mode lets up to four friends compete in a wireless cook off with only one game card, while players can customize their kitchen--and even Mama--in the fresh Decoration Mode.

A simple collection of cooking-themed minigames with a painfully cheery anime chef lady guiding you through all the slicing, dicing, baking, boiling, or whatever else, Cooking Mama was precisely the sort of simple game that just about anybody who needed a quick, thought-free distraction could pick up and enjoy for a few minutes at a time. Now comes Cooking Mama 2, a game that microwaves some of the leftovers from the first game, tosses some new ingredients on top, and presents itself as a new meal. Little to nothing has been futzed with formulaically, with just a couple of half-baked ... Expand full review

Cooking Mama 2 follows the same basic gameplay formula as the last game, serving up about 80 new recipes that consist of a series of culinary-themed minigames. Want to make a chili dog? Grind up some meat, chop some vegetables, cook them up, and put together your dog. Want to make some sweet sushi rolls? Pound out the rice, fillet whatever fish varieties you're presented with, and roll it all up. Some of these include several minigames, whereas some only require a single one. You're judged by Mama, the aforementioned anime chef, at the end of each game. You get a medal for how well you performed each task, and at the end of the recipe, a score is tallied up showing how well you did.

Other modes include a customization mode where you can decorate your kitchen (as well as Mama herself) with a bunch of little knickknacks that you unlock as you play, as well as a rather careless multiplayer mode. It seems like there ought to be a lot of potential for some decent multiplayer competition in Cooking Mama 2, whether it's competing or cooperating on recipes, but there's no such action here. Instead, you and up to three friends can connect wirelessly (using a single copy of the game) to compete in a bunch of stand-alone minigames with no recipe context to go along with them. Who can ball together hamburger meat the fastest? Or grind meat? Or shuck corn? These are the only answers this mode can give.