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Crafting Mama
Jan. 28th, 2011 11:11 pmMan, Mama's gotten soft.
In the earlier games, if you wanted a gold medal, you had to do things perfectly. Every time. If you screwed up, even once, it was a bronze medal and Mama's fiery eyes for you. If you did it too slowly--and not finishing was a reasonable possibility for a lot of the games--you got a silver medal. Getting a gold medal for a full recipe was an achievement. By Cooking Mama 3, this had softened a bit, as they added the "Wow!" bonus for doing a task particularly fast, so cooking with Mama became a little easier to compensate. When cooking for your friends, though, it was still totally plausible to fail out if you got a bronze medal on any task, and a single mistake was still often enough to get that.
Crafting Mama, though? She's a pushover. You can make lots of mistakes that would have cost you the medal in earlier games, and all you get is a mistake noise and a slight delay. (An example would be the "carry the pottery to the oven" game, which is functionally identical to "carry the pizza to the oven" in Cooking Mama 3. Except that in this version, if you drop it, you get a new piece of pottery to try again in the remaining time. (In the old version? Fire eyes!) In many of the games, you can make mistakes and still not only get a gold medal, but you can still get a "Wow!" for doing it super-fast. The gold medals hardly seem special any more.
I give them credit, in that there are a fair number of new minigames, lots of different crafts, and each craft unlocks a special different minigame when you get a gold medal (button) for it. There's also the "mystery crafting" section, which contains nine more crafts that get put into the normal section when you finish them, and if you get a medal in the normal section, those also unlock new minigames. Each of those minigames is a challenge with a medal and a super medal to win at certain point thresholds. Oh, and most of the crafts require you to do them five times—once in each color—to fill up your display case. So there's a lot to do. There’s no internal game clock, of course, but it seems like I spent more time on this than previous incarnations.
The crafting is fun, and there's a lot of variety to it, but I think I like the cooking better. Despite the fact that in either case nothing is really being made, cooking is just more my thing.
In the earlier games, if you wanted a gold medal, you had to do things perfectly. Every time. If you screwed up, even once, it was a bronze medal and Mama's fiery eyes for you. If you did it too slowly--and not finishing was a reasonable possibility for a lot of the games--you got a silver medal. Getting a gold medal for a full recipe was an achievement. By Cooking Mama 3, this had softened a bit, as they added the "Wow!" bonus for doing a task particularly fast, so cooking with Mama became a little easier to compensate. When cooking for your friends, though, it was still totally plausible to fail out if you got a bronze medal on any task, and a single mistake was still often enough to get that.
Crafting Mama, though? She's a pushover. You can make lots of mistakes that would have cost you the medal in earlier games, and all you get is a mistake noise and a slight delay. (An example would be the "carry the pottery to the oven" game, which is functionally identical to "carry the pizza to the oven" in Cooking Mama 3. Except that in this version, if you drop it, you get a new piece of pottery to try again in the remaining time. (In the old version? Fire eyes!) In many of the games, you can make mistakes and still not only get a gold medal, but you can still get a "Wow!" for doing it super-fast. The gold medals hardly seem special any more.
I give them credit, in that there are a fair number of new minigames, lots of different crafts, and each craft unlocks a special different minigame when you get a gold medal (button) for it. There's also the "mystery crafting" section, which contains nine more crafts that get put into the normal section when you finish them, and if you get a medal in the normal section, those also unlock new minigames. Each of those minigames is a challenge with a medal and a super medal to win at certain point thresholds. Oh, and most of the crafts require you to do them five times—once in each color—to fill up your display case. So there's a lot to do. There’s no internal game clock, of course, but it seems like I spent more time on this than previous incarnations.
The crafting is fun, and there's a lot of variety to it, but I think I like the cooking better. Despite the fact that in either case nothing is really being made, cooking is just more my thing.
