After her initial DS debut, Mama is whipping up some kitchen competition by pitting chef against chef in Cooking Mama: Cook Off-a unique 2 player family game designed specifically for the Wii home video console. Step-by-step, recipe-by-recipe, help Mama cook international dishes from 10 different nations and watch as the realistic foods.
“In short, this is all a bit of a mess, and a contingent of fans across social media are becoming vocal about how very unusual this situation has become. The few people that have been able secure a copy. As you’d expect, it looks like just another Cooking Mama game - nothing about what I’ve seen suggests that it’s broken, offensive, or any other quality that could cause this level of confusion, silence and general oddity.But perhaps all this should have been expected, because almost everything about the run-up to Cookstar’s release has been decidedly odd. Also called Cooking Mama: Coming Home to Mama (I can’t fully work out when or why it swapped to Cookstar), the game has been in 2019, and had an (including an incorrect release window and a non-existent website).The first real mystery to contend with is who has actually made this game. The Cooking Mama series was created by Japanese developer Office Create, which hit a goldmine when the games started to sell by the million on Nintendo DS.
Office Create eventually changed its name to Cooking Mama Ltd., making 10 mainline and spin-off games in the series. Seemingly just to confuse me further, it seems that, at some point, it changed its name back to Office Create, the developer listed on the most recently released Cooking Mama games.
But neither of those company names are on the packaging or merchandising for Cookstar.An early classification by the Australian ratings board listed its developer as 1st Playable Productions - an education game developer - but, and a includes no mention of 1st Playable. 1st Playable itself makes no mention of the game on.Nintendo and the devs really dropped the ball with Cooking Mama Cookstar. I was able to preorder as soon as the trailer went out but displaying the game on eShop only to take it off with no explanation and then leave folks hanging when it was suppose to out in late March. — SIMPAI is on Alba Island (@MadamZeti) The sole mention of a creator on Cooking Mama: Cookstar’s box is Planet Entertainment.
Planet Entertainment is a part of Planet Digital Partners, a US company that boasts, in, “an all-star team of video game industry leaders including the former PlayStation Europe President, the founder of Take 2/Grand Theft Auto, the former CEO of Guitar Hero and hit-maker developers of Halo, Quake, and NBA Playgrounds.”That would seem to get us somewhere, but even this is something of a dead end. Neither Planet Entertainment, nor Planet Digital claim to be developers - both list themselves as publishers. I tried to work out if Planet Entertainment could be the development arm of Planet Digital Partners, and looked up its listed company headquarters – it’s just a sizeable house in rural Connecticut.
I mean, it’s not impossible that that house is bustling with clever people coding virtual lettuce, but it doesn’t feel likely.And it gets stranger: Planet doesn’t seem to acknowledge its involvement with Cooking Mama: Cookstar anywhere other than the game’s box, and the Cookstar website. The has been silent since 2019, and there’s no mention of the game on the.
In fact, that website has actively. Thankfully, we can see some of those original posts, because they were – and an August 2019 entry became notable for announcing that the new Cooking Mama would be the “first game to integrate blockchain technology on major consoles”, which led to widespread confusion at the time. That press release discussed adding in-game currencies, online events and “Private-Key Enabled Balanced DRM”. Please remember, we’re talking about a Cooking Mama game.Just to up the strangeness a little more, a final paragraph announced that the game would have a vegetarian mode - for which it. Only the vegetarian mode appears to have made it into the final release from what I’ve seen of the game.It adds up to make one of the stranger cases of a missing game that I can remember - certainly not vaporware, but very certainly a hazy proposition. A game released in a liminal space – it’s out, but it’s not out out. Someone, somewhere is, but isn’t responding to fan queries about what’s happened to the game – who is that?
How have both digital and physical releases ended up in fans’ hands legitimately, when they should seemingly have never been released? “The sad thing is, at the heart of this whirlwind of weirdness, there’s a group of people that just want to play a new game, and can’t – and they aren’t being told why.I’ve attempted to make contact with Planet Entertainment, Planet Digital Partners, Koch Media, and Office Create about the game, to try and get to the bottom of who made Cooking Mama: Cookstar, when it will be officially released, why any of this has happened at all, and to check if it actually is the world’s first blockchain-enabled console game.
At time of writing, none of them have responded. A PR agency for Planet, Sandbox Strategies, has replied but unfortunately can’t answer my questions. The mystery, unfortunately, continues. If you have any information about the saga of Cooking Mama: Cookstar, please email. Please, at the very least for my poor brain’s sake, do it.