Gardening Mama
Nov. 6th, 2011 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroYou know, I think I can take back what I said about Mama getting soft. I think she’s just distracted from the cooking by other tasks. Mama and her friends return to teach you gardening in a new variant on an existing concept, Gardening Mama
The game is much more sequential and time-bound that the others—you can’t do the fertilizing minigames or the insecticide minigame until you’ve done the planting minigame for each crop. And pretty much after each step you do, one of the other crops will pop up an “It’s wilting!” alert, indicating you should do the next step of that one next. Ignore that, and that crop might wilt away completely, sending you back to the first step. The games are also cumulative, so you need to be perfect all the way through to get a gold medal for the entire crop. (Because of this, I think I used the “practice” mode much more than in any other Mama game.)
There are a bunch of the tasks that are much less intuitive/well-explained than in previous games, too. There’s a minigame in which you turn over the soil where it took half a dozen tries to figure out how to get the different-sized scoops of earth. (They tend to be the trickiest, because how much dirt you scoop is dependent on how quickly you slide the stylus, and that takes some practice to get right.) It took several tries to figure out why I kept failing the “pour fertilizer in a line” game. And one of the planting games has so many steps as a single minigame (drop dirt, pat dirt, water, flatten dirt) that it easily could have been split into several tasks.
There are several versions of the same minigames, probably to try to stop them from being repetitive. There are several versions of the “match the colored fertilizer” game, and the “draw shapes” games (for pouring fertilizer and spraying water) add new patterns the more you do them. There are also several different ways to spray insecticide, water plants, catch mice and remove bugs.
I don’t know why, but some of the background music, particularly the “victory” gold medal music, doesn’t seem right to me. It's not “bright” enough for the setting, I think.
Oh, and the other thing that’s irritating: When you finish the entire sequence, you harvest fruits and vegetables for points (which are recorded), but flowers instead bloom for a while, and then eventually die and are replaced with a blank field and “Let’s Garden Again”. Which is great for replay value and all, but your medal disappears with the previous crop, so you can’t have an entire field of gold medals.
I think I like the general philosophy of crafting/cooking/food crops better: You accomplish this task and get a thing. If you do the task again, you get the thing again. Flower gardening is much more about “these flowers will be here for a while and then go away.” It feels like less of an accomplishment. (This may inform my preferences in real life, too.)
It’s not clear what gets you the “bonus” items—sometimes it’s from doing the task perfectly in less time, sometimes it seems to be just from completing the task perfectly. (That is, you get a bonus if you get a gold medal. Either that, or something else triggered it that I was always doing without realizing it.)
When you’re given the option to use fertilizer on a plant, the type of fertilizer will determine the color of the flower or fruit you end up with. (Purple carrots!) Unless it’s a plant-specific special fertilizer, in which case you’ll get a bonus special fruit (which goes in your treasure chest and can be planted in your special garden) when you harvest. This is why most of the early bonus items you get are all fertilizer items: So you can start applying them to your crops right away.
For reference (because Gamefaqs doesn't have it), the special fruits/flowers for the cute treasure chest are grown from apples, squash, potatoes, strawberries, sunflowers, tulips, pansies, roses and trailing roses. Getting them all unlocks a special honey-making minigame.
Overall: If you've liked the other Mama games, you'll probably like this one. It's more of the same, really. I do think it's a little more frustrating and obtuse in parts than the other games, but not so much to make it unenjoyable. Also, if you ever wanted to grow hot pink grapes, this may be your only chance.
The game is much more sequential and time-bound that the others—you can’t do the fertilizing minigames or the insecticide minigame until you’ve done the planting minigame for each crop. And pretty much after each step you do, one of the other crops will pop up an “It’s wilting!” alert, indicating you should do the next step of that one next. Ignore that, and that crop might wilt away completely, sending you back to the first step. The games are also cumulative, so you need to be perfect all the way through to get a gold medal for the entire crop. (Because of this, I think I used the “practice” mode much more than in any other Mama game.)
There are a bunch of the tasks that are much less intuitive/well-explained than in previous games, too. There’s a minigame in which you turn over the soil where it took half a dozen tries to figure out how to get the different-sized scoops of earth. (They tend to be the trickiest, because how much dirt you scoop is dependent on how quickly you slide the stylus, and that takes some practice to get right.) It took several tries to figure out why I kept failing the “pour fertilizer in a line” game. And one of the planting games has so many steps as a single minigame (drop dirt, pat dirt, water, flatten dirt) that it easily could have been split into several tasks.
There are several versions of the same minigames, probably to try to stop them from being repetitive. There are several versions of the “match the colored fertilizer” game, and the “draw shapes” games (for pouring fertilizer and spraying water) add new patterns the more you do them. There are also several different ways to spray insecticide, water plants, catch mice and remove bugs.
I don’t know why, but some of the background music, particularly the “victory” gold medal music, doesn’t seem right to me. It's not “bright” enough for the setting, I think.
Oh, and the other thing that’s irritating: When you finish the entire sequence, you harvest fruits and vegetables for points (which are recorded), but flowers instead bloom for a while, and then eventually die and are replaced with a blank field and “Let’s Garden Again”. Which is great for replay value and all, but your medal disappears with the previous crop, so you can’t have an entire field of gold medals.
I think I like the general philosophy of crafting/cooking/food crops better: You accomplish this task and get a thing. If you do the task again, you get the thing again. Flower gardening is much more about “these flowers will be here for a while and then go away.” It feels like less of an accomplishment. (This may inform my preferences in real life, too.)
It’s not clear what gets you the “bonus” items—sometimes it’s from doing the task perfectly in less time, sometimes it seems to be just from completing the task perfectly. (That is, you get a bonus if you get a gold medal. Either that, or something else triggered it that I was always doing without realizing it.)
When you’re given the option to use fertilizer on a plant, the type of fertilizer will determine the color of the flower or fruit you end up with. (Purple carrots!) Unless it’s a plant-specific special fertilizer, in which case you’ll get a bonus special fruit (which goes in your treasure chest and can be planted in your special garden) when you harvest. This is why most of the early bonus items you get are all fertilizer items: So you can start applying them to your crops right away.
For reference (because Gamefaqs doesn't have it), the special fruits/flowers for the cute treasure chest are grown from apples, squash, potatoes, strawberries, sunflowers, tulips, pansies, roses and trailing roses. Getting them all unlocks a special honey-making minigame.
Overall: If you've liked the other Mama games, you'll probably like this one. It's more of the same, really. I do think it's a little more frustrating and obtuse in parts than the other games, but not so much to make it unenjoyable. Also, if you ever wanted to grow hot pink grapes, this may be your only chance.
