The world of video games has always had a certain fascination for the concept of mystery and for the repetition of the same.
Video games are full of mysterious events, with youtube channels (which we adore) who are concerned with listing them and showing their innermost nature.
Sometimes these mysteries are only the result of intentional work, other times they are the result of unfinished work for the most varied reasons, other times they have incomprehensible origins that make them remain in a terrifying limbo, where there are no answers to give or suggestions to conceive. .
The mystery we are going to talk about today is of a strange kind because, on balance, it's not so much about a video game but its publication.
The latest chapter in the popular saga of Cooking Mama, Of which we had already spoken some time ago, it was on physical and digital shelves for very little and you can't (almost) understand why.
Cooking Mama: Cookstar aka who saw it?
Let's immediately throw it into laughter: Cooking Mama: Cookstar it is a game that can be defined as quantum. This is because, depending on its observer or depending on the rumors that are being consulted, the title seems to be on the market or completely disappeared from the world of digital delivery.
The whole affair was analyzed in great detail by the boys of IGN America, who were the first to investigate the matter.
The latest advertising effort made by the publisher of the title (whose name we will see later) reports the classic advertising press release followed by a trailer; the launch of the game essentially had to be like the launch of any other medium / low budget video game.
Something has obviously gone wrong and you can find out just by reading the comments.
We are in quarantine and ok, the title may not be available on physical shelves.
Why can't you even find it on Nintendo eShop?
At the moment the title does not seem to be available on either the European or the American store; on the European one, looking for the keyword Cooking Mama we are served up almost ten results, all for consoles other than Nintendo Switch. The game is not even mentioned, there is no game card with it written out.
Nothing at all.
Su Reddit someone did the work for us, finding that the title was made available on the Nintendo Eshop American last week just for a few hours, only to be removed without warning.
Going to the official website of the game you can try to buy the title, having the right opportunity to buy it physically from some store that relies on Amazon (from a shop called your cooking mama, moreover) for considerable amounts (€ 80 at the time of writing). Walmart has no more copies of the game and clicking on Nintendo eShop you are sent back to a nice error page; the other major US retailers don't even know when they will receive the game.
Anyway, someone managed to get their hands on a copy of the title, as you can see in this thread of Reddit.
All this described above is still valid for American users, for us poor Europeans things are decidedly different since there is no trace of the game everywhere except for an absurd version Playstation 4 present on the site of Koch Media.
The doubts obviously become multiple and suffocating: how the hell do we play Cooking Mama Cookstar su PlayStation 4? Because the title is not present on the self-styled website developer (of which they have reviewed the good Zanki Zero, Furthermore)?
Explaining quantum physics with Cooking Mama Cookstar.
From what we've seen so far, Cooking Mama: Cookstar is the perfect definition of a quantum video game. Fortunately, someone managed to get their hands on copies of that game and come up with something, such as images or videos.
The gameplay seems to be that of a usual Cooking Mama.
Vegetables are peeled, food is cooked, things are boiled; the game in theory should also have a vegetarian mode which made PETA happy and won a very special award for the title.
The reality is that the more you observe someone digging into history, the more weird and oddities worthy of interplanetary alignments come out. Nothing seems to have gone right during the development and marketing of this game.
Cooking Mama: Cookstar originally it should have been called Cooking Mama: Coming Home To Mama and popped up on journalists' radars during 2019, from the classic leak linked to the rating boards, complete with a trailer out of the leak full of wrong data that couldn't be more wrong.
Di Cooking Mama: Cookstar some things have never been fully understood. The series was created by a Japanese software house called Office Create which made a resounding success with the first chapters of the brand on Nintendo DS.
Office Create it then changed its name, after the first two games, to become the Cooking Mama Ltd, author of the next ten video games of the brand between the various consoles and then change again the name in Office Create, the software house technically behind the brand's new video game. Too bad there is no logo on the various covers to suggest the identity of the authors of the title.
At the time of the leak, the Australian rating agency reported the guys from 1st Playable Productions, a small software house that usually deals with educational video games. Needless to say, even in this case, Cooking Mama: Cookstar does not appear in any site belonging to the software house (which, moreover, does not seem to work at the moment).
The only company mentioned on the game box appears to be a certain one Planet Entertainment, or a branch publisher of a large American company that in theory contains virtuosos of videogame development.
IGN he probed deeper, going to check the existence of a developer who works exclusively for that company, ending up finding its headquarters in a large rural house located in the countryside of Connecticut.
This is undoubtedly something that generates suspicion, but perhaps it is not as important as we believe for the purposes of the story.
Planet Entertainment has chosen to obliterate any track of the game from his portfolio, even going as far as deleteold posts from his site suing the new cooking simulator. The content of those posts were press releases that talked about, hear ya, blockchain technologies integrated into video games.
No, Cooking Mama: Cookstars isn't using the switch to mine bitcoins.
We are approaching the heart of the story.
Cooking Mama: Cookstars is a video game that was born far from the comfortable grounds of its predecessors and has been, for reasons still not entirely clear, erased from the face of the earth.
The reasons seem to be linked to technical problems, or to the combination of the cooking mama video game with blockchain technology. The thing was declared directly by the publisher on a old press release, then circulated around the world during August 2019.
According to the latest tweets from the official CKC account, which occurred after the publication of the IGN report, the stock would have problems coming out on the market due to the problems caused by the pandemic, an event that is heavily slowing down the production chain.
Unfortunately this news does not seem to have been received by the majority of journalistic outlets, who are concerned instead with spreading the news that the title literally melts Nintendo Switch mining cryptocurrencies while playing.
The thing was denied by different Twitter users who, having the opportunity to physically play the title, took a look at the game officially denying the absolute majority of the rumors.
Cooking Mama Cookstar works as the developers intended and the much vaunted blockchain technology is removed from the title. The same publisher then explained the nature of their idea: allow users to exchange game assets with some kind of in-game currency.
There is something more besides the coronavirus which, however, seems to have blocked the release of the game, something of a legal nature.
It seems that the software house in charge of making the game (software house that at the moment is still unknown to us, we repeat it) has improperly used the soundtracks of the previous chapters by downloading them from youtube. This has been discovered by the usual geek users who have taken a good step to analyze the code and the contents, line by line.
Then the magic is broken, the plot fades, and most of the doubts are unraveled.
Cooking Mama: Cookstars it's a game born unlucky, developed in the midst of a thousand problems and released in a rather disastrous period in the life of our globe.
Between coronaviruses, press silences due to PR errors and strange conspiracy theories fueled by users twitter / discord bored or just plain mischievous, the new chapter of the popular cooking simulator will be remembered in the annals for completely different reasons than those usually associated with the concept of video games.
We can say we are sorry for all those who in an attempt to play the title have ended up paying very high figures on the various distribution sites that have speculated on the thing.
[UPDATE] The statements of the developers.
The story, as expected, is not over.
Before dawn on 7 April a member of the software house responsible for Cooking Mama Cookstar has contacted ScreenRant to clarify the story, revealing some important background and giving meaning to many of the rumors circulating about the title.
The developer wished to remain anonymous but started immediately by making one thing clear: none Switch Bitcoin was mined.
You know all those statements made about cryptocurrency mining on Switch? All lies. Planet Entertainment management knows very little about the subject and has used cryptocurrencies as a bait for all potential investors who appreciate this sort of thing. The crashes or overheating of the consoles are mostly related to the state of the title. Cooking Mama Cookstar is a video game made in Unity, developed by many people on their first title.
It is by no means a perfect product but it has still gone through a lot of quality checks by both Nintendo and Sony, I don't think it's possible to pass those tests by putting a hell of a miner into the software and I don't even think there is anyone. with the technical skills to program stuff like this at 1p (developer name)
If there are no cryptocurrency problems, why is the title still in limbo? The answer to this question is very interesting and sheds a glimmer of light on how the video game industry works today.
Cooking Mama: Cookstar has been withdrawn from Nintendo eShop for a very specific reason. At the moment there is a legal battle between the publisher (Planet Entertainment and the owner of the IP (Office Create). Office Create specifically asked the publisher to improve the polish status of the game or to cancel it and everything against Planet Entertainment has unfortunately this kind of problem occurred very often during the development of the game, with a really bad management of the development team by the publisher.
At one point, Official Create spokespersons came to visit us to supervise the development of the game and this generated very strong friction. Our managers literally yelled at these supervisors, forcing them to go home if they didn't come up with at least constructive criticism of our game. After pulling out Cooking Mama: Cookstar, from what I understand, the Office Create spokespersons used their contacts at Nintendo to take the game out of the digital shop and to stop production of the cartridges.
Here in 1p we all love the Cooking Mama brand very much and we have tried to do our best with the means that have been made available to us to make an acceptable product. I am sure that the game is far from perfect but I think it is undoubted to say that the publishers have absolutely not given us a hand in working to the best of our three possibilities, given the aforementioned developments.
The developer also talked about the serious communication problems that occurred during the different stages of development that allowed a publisher to publish a game without letting its developers know much.
We didn't know anything specific about the release date of the game. We were told that the title was destined to hit the shelves by the end of March and nothing else. Our manager has always kept most of these issues to herself, saying she doesn't want to stress us out with them.
From what we know, marketing has also been ostracized by the guys at Office Create. I know that our publisher had prepared commercials for youtube, dedicated websites and also commercials that would be destined for Tik Tok who have never seen the light of day. From what I know at the moment Planet Entertainment has decided to take Office Create to court, trying to get a refund for all the money lost. I have no idea if the game will ever get an official release, but I think it deserves it as a title.
a is preparing to become the most requested title of all collectors, as it will probably end up in the common grave of video games crushed by colors that only want to make money on games. However, it is important to know this to finally put an end to the rumors about cryptocurrencies, illicit mining and this kind of practice.
We sincerely hope to be able to see and maybe talk more clearly about this video game over the next few months, perhaps with a finished and almost refined product in hand.
