Way back in the day, or 2006 if you prefer, I was just starting to try my hand at writing about videogames. I found myself waxing philosophical about the delights of digital entertainment for Nerve’s sister magazine, the ever-popular parenting rag Babble. Writing about videogames for potentially uninformed parents is a whole lot different than writing for gamers. It's not just the descriptive language at your disposal (turns out not everyone knows exactly what you mean when you use “boss” and “fight” in conjunction,) but also the games you find yourself discussing. Had I not been writing for Babble, chances are I would have never played the original Cooking Mama. It seemed perfectly charming, another creative idea born out of the Nintendo DS’ meteoric rise to power, but not exactly the type of game I’d go out of my way to play. Much as I like to fancy myself an aesthete, I’m almost always going to choose shooting zombies over making a soufflé, in real life and in videogames. Of course, I became hopelessly addicted to Cooking Mama. Call it Pavlov’s Dog training, but every single time I heard a ding and saw a pretty gold medal after finishing a recipe, I immediately fired up another. Cooking Mama struck a precious balance between precise gameplay and speed. There was never any waiting in the original, just a flow of manageable tasks and visual rewards.
Cooking Mama World Kitchen is the first Cooking Mama built from the ground up for a home console – Wii’s Cooking Mama: Cook Off was more or less the same game as the DS versions with some dubious Wii controls thrown in the mix – and it’s got all the amenities that a console-sized upgrade brings: fifty plus new recipes, revamped and functional Wii controls, voiceovers (absent from the build I saw) and a full-on three-dimensional makeover. World Kitchen’s actually quite a looker, comfortable in its low-fi presentation and brimming with the same sort of sticky-sweet, super-deformed charisma that made the original such a treat. It’s a diamond in the shovelware-rough of Wii games, an accessible title that doesn’t offend the eyes with motion controls that actually, you know, work.
Or at least it could be. As of now, World Kitchen suffers from TMDCS, a syndrome not uncommon in Wii games. TMDCS, or Too Many Damn Cutscenes Sickness, is an affliction where gameplay is constantly interrupted by needless cutscenes that add little to nothing to the overall game. One of World Kitchen’s new features is “the Mama save”. Say, for example, you flip a burger too high in the air. Mama will step in to save the meat slab before the fifteen second rule has to come into play. Other times, Mama’s dog, the terrifying critter you see above, will try to snatch up morsels that fall to the floor and Mama has to race him to save the snacks. There’s limited play in these segments, but they’re more cinema than mini-game and it cripples the flow of play. But not nearly as much as the awarding of medals. Where the original Cooking Mama graded you after you completed a full dish, World Kitchen congratulates you with a full cutscene after every single step of the recipe. Cracked some eggs? Get ready for freaking graduation day. They can’t be skipped. They can’t be turned off. You just have to grin and bear it.
For a game whose greatest strength, beyond its unique play, is its immediate accessibility and speed, these scenes are crippling. I don’t understand the impulse. It’s one thing to have a game littered with narrative cutscenes, or even quick time events, provided they serve the game. But littering your game with non-interactive sequences that don’t enhance play, story, or even context is little more than creating a barrier between player and play.
Related links:
Wii MotionPlus – Say What, Nintendo?
Love-Hate: In Defense of the Cutscene
Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima’s Inability to Show Instead of Tell
Game Rage
