Why Cooking Mama is the most Perfectly Designed game in Gaming Histoy

Why Cooking Mama is the most Perfectly Designed game in Gaming History

This is not in any way a joke. When people talk about gaming’s greatest accomplishments they talk of the liked of Half Life and Ocarina of Time. Gaming’s most recognisable characters to most are the like of Mario and Sonic. Read on and you’ll be convinced you’ve been wrong all along.

 

What makes a good game? This is a pretty fundamental question to anyone who plays games and we all differ slightly in our answer. We’re all very aware that too many publishers these day try to appeal to everyone and completely fall flat, making something bland and mediocre. Cooking Mama does not attempt to appeal to everyone, I’m sure it would have been very easy to add in FPS, driving or zombie elements into the game but Cooking Mama chose to not to try to broaden its audience to every living thing on the earth.

 

Gameplay is quite naturally important in games and cooking Mama took its mechanics, refined them and made them work. Innovation is a hot topic when it comes to video game discussions and games often try to innovate for innovations sake. Take the WII U as a well-known example. Does Cooking Mama innovate a whole lot?  Honestly no, it takes its collection of mini games and executes each one extremely well.

 

Graphics is a big thing with video games too. The fact of the matter is realistic graphics tend not to age well. Think of old games that still look good today, they tend to be cartoon like graphics that instead of intending to look realistic look good, colourful and fun. A game that springs to mind for me in Donkey Kong country. It still looks good with its bright array of colours. My favourite games for artistic style are the Professor Layton games. The hand drawn style to me look superb, it’s artistic and looks great and never attempts to look realistic. Cooking Mama uses bright colours and a cheerful look. You can easily tell what each thing is supposed to be but it doesn’t feel the need to look like a real kitchen, the bright colours make the game look pleasant and fun.

 

How important is story in games. Some games make it THE priority. However let’s face it, many games do not do story well at all. A lot of game stories are there to fill space between gameplay and while some games do story excellently well many are pretty bad by the standards of other forms of media such as films and novels. These are things with story as the priority however and sometimes games just ignore complex story in favour of fun and light hearted gaming. Cooking Mama does this perfectly. A plot with many twists, conspiracies and complex characters could have been shoehorned in but it would likely have been annoying and under whelming. Cooking Mama knows what it is and sticks to it.

 

I have one final point. Cooking Mama is if nothing else, fun. Even the most jaded and overly masculine of guys who spend their free time drinking beer and fighting bears could sit down and enjoy a light session of cooking Mama. I’ve never met a single person who does not enjoy Cooking Mama and for good reason, no one can resist the enjoyment of being greatly overly praised by a warm motherly voice for completing simple tasks. If you’re reading EA, this is the game that appeals to everyone and will make all the money in the world you want to make. Now I’m going to stop typing, I want to go and play some more Mass Effect.