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 Hooksexup’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.
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