Review- Cooking Mama 3: Shop and Chop
WARNING: This is a joke review. Those of you looking for a serious review of Cooking Mama 3... Well, that's just weird. Why do you want a serious review of this? Anywhere, maybe just look elsewhere for it.
You wake up in a dark room. Where are you? Have we been here before? It smells familiar. Smells like sadness and maybe leg of lamb on a bed of rice with a saffron garnish. Surely we've been here before. There's a familiar sense of loss looming here. All of a sudden, you notice a door. Was that there before? Surely not. Regardless you walk towards it. Before you open the door, you hear a sound of scraping and the smell of something cooking (it's probably just lamb or something, maybe veal). The door opens and Mama stares you in the face, while skinning your best friend alive. She screams into your face "COOKING MAMA 3!!!" Welcome back to hell. We've missed you.
What is Cooking Mama 3 then? It's a brand new slice of hell, served up in just the most adorable package. If you enjoy being forced to perform menial tasks by the cruelest taskmaster in the world who genuinely shoots fire out of her eyes. There are all sorts of fun tasks you can be forced into. For example: pulling cakes out of the oven, getting water out of rice and shoving sticks onto marshmallows. That's not a joke, these are all genuine minigames. Oh, and by the way, that's three out of twenty minigames. I'm not sure how familiar you all are with minigames but by nature they're very short. And if there's only twenty? That's a big no no. We then have essentially twenty minutes of gameplay if we're feeling generous. And I know for a fact that I've put in more than twenty minutes into this. So somewhere, something has gone horribly wrong.
Of course, it's unfair to just judge a game on gameplay. I mean, what does that even matter to the gamer? What's most important is that in this game, you can make your own recipes! Wow! That almost makes it sound like they tried to put effort in. Except when you look at it, you realise what little effort actually went in. You are greeted by a screen with six ingredients on it. Choose two ingredients and then be subjected to more of that award winning gameplay that the series is loved for. Except that the minigames are easier than ever so the slight element of difficulty present in the last dung pile is gone. And the thing is, that's all this mode is. Mix two ingredients, get the same meal. You can't mix more than that, you can't make different meals with the same ingredients and most importantly, you can never escape.
But fortunately, this is all made up for in the Mama dress up flash game that's included on the cartridge. In this mode you can do all sorts of fun things. You can put on silly hats, slightly less blood soaked aprons or even necklaces made of ears. You can even dress up the bound and gagged members of Mama's family as their tears stain the carpet. There is of course a catch. When you do minigames particularly quickly, you're awarded with a quarter of a heart. Collect the whole heart and you get a scratch card. Get a scratch card and then you might win a slightly funnier hat or some amusing earrings. It's a wonderful mode that encourages replayability even more than that controller that drew blood every time you took damage in a video game.
If you're playing Cooking Mama 3, it's not by choice. It's because people draw amusement from you talking about it for five or so paragraphs online and then giving it an arbitrary score. As a game to review, I highly recommend it. You can tear into it in so many ways from so many angles. You can use metaphors for it being literally hell or that whole Mama looking evil thing. It's a review goldmine. However, this game should not be seen by mere mortals, just those who are pretentious enough to force people into caring about their opinions. Therefore the game gets a
You wake up in a dark room. Where are you? Have we been here before? It smells familiar. Smells like sadness and maybe leg of lamb on a bed of rice with a saffron garnish. Surely we've been here before. There's a familiar sense of loss looming here. All of a sudden, you notice a door. Was that there before? Surely not. Regardless you walk towards it. Before you open the door, you hear a sound of scraping and the smell of something cooking (it's probably just lamb or something, maybe veal). The door opens and Mama stares you in the face, while skinning your best friend alive. She screams into your face "COOKING MAMA 3!!!" Welcome back to hell. We've missed you.
What is Cooking Mama 3 then? It's a brand new slice of hell, served up in just the most adorable package. If you enjoy being forced to perform menial tasks by the cruelest taskmaster in the world who genuinely shoots fire out of her eyes. There are all sorts of fun tasks you can be forced into. For example: pulling cakes out of the oven, getting water out of rice and shoving sticks onto marshmallows. That's not a joke, these are all genuine minigames. Oh, and by the way, that's three out of twenty minigames. I'm not sure how familiar you all are with minigames but by nature they're very short. And if there's only twenty? That's a big no no. We then have essentially twenty minutes of gameplay if we're feeling generous. And I know for a fact that I've put in more than twenty minutes into this. So somewhere, something has gone horribly wrong.
Of course, it's unfair to just judge a game on gameplay. I mean, what does that even matter to the gamer? What's most important is that in this game, you can make your own recipes! Wow! That almost makes it sound like they tried to put effort in. Except when you look at it, you realise what little effort actually went in. You are greeted by a screen with six ingredients on it. Choose two ingredients and then be subjected to more of that award winning gameplay that the series is loved for. Except that the minigames are easier than ever so the slight element of difficulty present in the last dung pile is gone. And the thing is, that's all this mode is. Mix two ingredients, get the same meal. You can't mix more than that, you can't make different meals with the same ingredients and most importantly, you can never escape.
But fortunately, this is all made up for in the Mama dress up flash game that's included on the cartridge. In this mode you can do all sorts of fun things. You can put on silly hats, slightly less blood soaked aprons or even necklaces made of ears. You can even dress up the bound and gagged members of Mama's family as their tears stain the carpet. There is of course a catch. When you do minigames particularly quickly, you're awarded with a quarter of a heart. Collect the whole heart and you get a scratch card. Get a scratch card and then you might win a slightly funnier hat or some amusing earrings. It's a wonderful mode that encourages replayability even more than that controller that drew blood every time you took damage in a video game.
If you're playing Cooking Mama 3, it's not by choice. It's because people draw amusement from you talking about it for five or so paragraphs online and then giving it an arbitrary score. As a game to review, I highly recommend it. You can tear into it in so many ways from so many angles. You can use metaphors for it being literally hell or that whole Mama looking evil thing. It's a review goldmine. However, this game should not be seen by mere mortals, just those who are pretentious enough to force people into caring about their opinions. Therefore the game gets a
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