Game: Crafting Mama

Platform: DS

Publisher: Majesco

Developer: Cooking Mama Ltd

ESRB: E

Genre: Crafting minigames

Players: 1-2

What's Hot: Lots of crafts to undertake, some of the minigames aren't too bad, not very difficult

What's Not:Too much repetition between crafting genres, no option to quit a craft or game, you're crafting

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Review by: Brandon "Mystery Crafting" Cackowski-Schnell

For kids, the craft store is the ultimate bait and switch. Oh sure, it looks like a toy store. Kinda. There are markers and paint and occasionally something that looks like a toy. Once you get closer though, you see that yeah, there are toys, but first you have to build them, and try as you might, that crappy wooden car ain't gonna turn into a badass robot. Oh and chisels? Not at all appropriate for an eight year old. My seventeen stitches can attest to that.

Despite my indifference to crafting, I thought that if anyone can make crafting fun, it's a woman with fire in her eyes and a deep, inconsolable rage within her belly, your friend and mine, Mama. After conquering the kitchen and the garden, Mama is about to get crafty all up in this joint and well, it's not very interesting. Not at all. Turns out that the threat of getting stabbed with a hot glue gun isn't enough to make crafting interesting.

The game offers a bunch of different projects for the player to attempt—like making jewelry, pottery, bamboo kaleidoscopes and pressed flowers. Each craft involves a series of steps represented by different minigames that will have you tapping the screen or rubbing a certain line in various configurations. The biggest problem with the game is that there's just too much repetition within the crafting genre. If you're making a jar or a pot or a mug, the majority of the steps are going to be the same with maybe one or two steps that are different. Oddly enough, for all of the pottery crafts, steadying the item on a tray as Mama stumbles her way to the kiln is part of the process as if whatever medication Mama takes to keep her violent temper under control makes her sway like a drunken sailor. As a result, if you do one pottery project, you've done them all. Sure there are several different types of candles to make, but the steps are all the same. Ditto with kerchiefs and any of the flower crafts.

Once you complete a project you'll open up a few extra activities around the object. Musical instruments such as the xylophone and ocarina can be played while clothing and jewelry items can be used to dress up Mama. All of the craft projects open up a mini-game that focuses on the object in question. They range from throwing a flower wreath on to your friends' heads to blowing into the DS's microphone to keep a paper plan aloft.

Some of the games can be played with another person via local Wi-Fi but none of them are interesting enough to bring another person into them. There are a few decent games in the mix, but most of them are throwaways and aside from how interesting you find them, there are a couple of issues with them. First is that some crafts require you to complete them first as mystery crafts which then adds them to the normal set of crafts, and then completed again with little or no variation to the steps before the mini-game is unlocked. Second, and this is a problem with every activity in the game, is that there is no option to quit once the game or activity is started. That's right. If you start a game when you didn't want to, you can either wait for the clock to run out, or restart the DS. If you start a craft and realize that it's not much different from the crafts you've already done, same thing. Why an option to quit a craft or game early wasn't added is beyond me, but now I know how Mama feels every time I cut the bamboo incorrectly. Luckily all of the crafts are pretty easy, making them suitable for crafters of all ages.

Crafting Mama is just kind of there. It's not terrribly difficult and there's not enough to the crafting to encourage making multiple variations of the same pot or pressed flower. Sure the games you're rewarded with may hold your interest the first time you play them, but after that you'll be looking for something more interesting to do. Mama may be queen in the kitchen but not even the gaming equivalent of Joan Crawford can make bead stringing fun.

Brandon Cackowski-Schnell is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast. He also writes for the blog The Nut and the Feisty Weasel .

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