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April 20, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Cake Mania fine for free, but not worth the cash

Cake Mania fine for free, but not worth the cash

By Amanda Phillips | Thresher staff

The word mania rarely indicates a positive condition in everyday conversation, but somehow when it appears in a video game title, it is supposed to suggest unrestricted fun and excitement.

In the case of Cake Mania, however, the classic Webster definition might ring a bit truer. It is excitement manifested by mental and physical hyperactivity, disorganization of behavior and elevation of mood. The game certainly qualifies as hyperactive, but a racing pulse does not always mean fun. Although it is a hit on the Internet, its transition to a handheld platform comes off as awkward and blatantly motivated by making money.

In Cake Mania, a fast-paced, popular game that made its Nintendo DS debut this month, the gamer controls a baker named Jill, aiding her in the quest to meet the demands of impatient customers. Though the focus should be on the lightning-quick bakery action, Cake Mania makes a bizarre attempt at integrating a narrative into the gameplay, telling the sob story of how corporate bakeries put Jill’s grandparents out of business. Now, armed with her grandmother’s recipes and an education from culinary school, Jill is out to climb the ranks as an independent baker and buy back her family’s old shop.

A traditional numerical level system without any narrative would have suited the style of the game well. Instead, the limited, cliche storyline is a poor excuse to divide the levels of the game into four years. Play occurs entirely within the bakery. Customers line up, and the gamer must offer menus, take orders and bake and decorate the cakes to order before the clients get angry and leave.

Things start out simple at first, with very basic cake orders and a few customers in the store at a time. As the game progresses, however, more decorating options and different types of clients pile up to increase the heat on poor Jill. Turning on the TV or serving sample cupcakes to cranky customers can buy some time for the overworked baker, but expect to see a lot of faces purple with rage.

Unfortunately, like the story, the cake-baking gimmick seems like a shallow excuse for gameplay that essentially consists of pressing the correct sequence of shapes within an increasingly stressful time limit.

There is some strategy involved in terms of upgrading the shop’s equipment between levels, but even determining when to buy a new oven is difficult unless you have already played the next level. Every month, new types of customers discover the shop, and they have different interests in different types of cakes. However, unless Jill is aware beforehand that November’s food critics will love frosting flowers or to save up in order to buy prohibitively expensive bridal cake toppers for the May wedding season, it is difficult to take advantage of vital sources of income. As a result, gameplay degenerates into a tap-fest. If your stylus accidentally grazes the star-shaped cake before the circle, you are doomed.

Such accidents are not uncommon given the transfer of the game from ample computer screen and tiny mouse pointer to the comparatively smaller and less precise DS console. The touchscreen of the DS usually feels very natural for quick-tapping gameplay such as this. But because Jill’s bakery is so crowded with icons that fit perfectly on a computer screen, the slim stylus feels incredibly clunky for operations such as choosing a cake shape or picking among a variety of frosting colors and decorations. With plenty of cranky customers to serve, an accidental — and irreversible — tap on the purple frosting instead of the red can spell disaster for an otherwise smoothly operating one-woman assembly line.

Despite its many failings, Cake Mania, true to its Web game roots, is incomprehensibly addictive. There is very little that is fun about multiple mis-taps in the bakery, but it’s easy to find yourself playing for hours on end. The DS version’s final insult, however, is that there is virtually no difference in content between the $20 card and its free online counterpart. Sure, the price tag is low for a Nintendo title, but there are reasons that massive Web portals offer casual games like this free of charge. They aren’t worth the Web space they occupy. Other than the convenience of being able to carry Cake Mania around in your pocket, there is little that justifies paying so much for a gratis game.

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