Apr 21, 4:03 pm
Cake Mania - never before has a computer game been so appropriately named. It makes Thornton’s on the eve of Easter Sunday look like a walk in the park. For there is much cake. And there is much, much mania.
Naturally I had to buy it the moment I heard of it. Confectionary is my middle name - well, it would have been if my mother hadn’t distracted me with a chocolate bar at the registry office when I was a baby. She thought ‘Lucy’ was a far more appropriate title - PAH! Thus throughout my adult life I felt slightly deprived. I sensed there was a hollowness, a deep feeling of hunger for the sugary goodness I felt I deserved. It corroded within me like a tooth in a bottle of coca cola left out overnight. So was Cake Mania the answer to my prayers?
Yes and no. Beginning life as a flash game followed by an expansion pack, the DS version brings both game and pack together in a tidy little bundle. When retail behemoth “Mega Mart” moves in, lead character Jill must use her l33t baking skillz to save the family business. You must serve a variety of customers with a variety of sugary demands within a certain time limit, upgrading and adding to your culinary equipment as you go. The faster you serve a customer the bigger the tip, and thus the bigger the profits. Get enough cash and you clear a level. Easy, right? In theory, yes. But in practice…
Although the DS is by nature a console to use anytime, anywhere, Cake Mania must be played in a quiet and empty room. The phone must be unplugged; the doorbell dismantled; the dog muzzled; the family sent packing. Why? Because Cake Mania demands you to play at the speed of light, with one hundred percent of your undivided attention. If you think years of gaming have honed your reaction times, think again. Cake Mania repeatedly batters and abuses you by sending more and more irate, ever-complicated customers your way. Any break in concentration - even pausing and un-pausing - will force you to go back to the beginning and start the level over again. Got something in your eye? Tough. Need to go to the toilet? Cross your legs and hold it. Every second counts, and this becomes increasingly apparent on the higher levels. But you can’t just mash up a few cakes and be done with it - Cake Mania wants you bleeding strawberry pulp before it will let you reign victorious. Clear too many levels without a big enough profit and you’ll eventually find yourself stuck. With not enough money to buy equipment upgrades, you can’t serve the customers fast enough - and right back to the beginning of the game you go…
It might sound like many gamers idea of hell. And it is. But it’s a sugar-coated addictive hell that repeatedly entices you to give it one more go. Its simplicity is absolutely necessarily when faced with the incredible demands placed upon you.
What will you see when you clear all forty-eight levels? Will Mega Mart be destroyed? Will the government shut you down for creating an obesity epidemic? I will never know. I have had my fill. The sugar overload was too much for me to bear, and I have seen the error of my unhealthy ways. I’ll never touch the game again, its sickly sweetness forever banished from my abode.
At least until lunch time, that is.
