Let's Play Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals

Ah... Thanksgiving.  You remember it, don't you?  That lovely holiday in which some female member of your family spends nine hours in the kitchen cooking a massive meal.  Then with maybe as many as both of your parents you sit down and eat and eat and eat and eat some more.  You have to eat, America demands it.  If you don't eat the economy falls and the terrorists win.  Also there are giant floating balloons of Pikachu and Spongebob, and a whole ton of football.  Its fun times for all, especially if you're not cooking.  Yup, Christmas is much more fun.  Still a whole month away?  Damn it!

Anyway, despite how Thanksgiving is a great holiday for everybody, there are some people who are displeased with it.  Yes, I'm sure the ghosts of Squantos's smallpox-infected people are pretty pissed, but they don't have a website.  Today we're going to talk about PETA.  PETA, as you might know are a group of animal-rights wackos who despise all usage of animals for any reason.  Fur?  Evil.  Meat?  Evil.  Fish oil?  Evil.  They've attacked clothing manufacturers, seeing-eye-dogs, KFC, circuses, and honestly believe that animal testing is too much of a price for a cure for AIDs.  Now they've turned their eyes onto the biggest threat of all to animals:  Your Mom.

In "Cooking Mama, The Unauthorized PETA Edition:  Mama Kills Animals" you play as the same cutsy chibi Mama character from Majesco's "Cooking Mama" series.  In the "Mama" games you play as Mama, who cooks with love using the stylus, and in later games babysits and crafts.  Some have brought up that these games might be sexist, but few have brought up how Mama is actually a spawn of Satan.  In PETA's version, Mama is an insane sadist who makes sure to rip her turkey to pieces herself.  The game is ridiculous, so over-the-top that I cannot believe that PETA honestly could have thought that this game is going to convince anybody to "pledge to be veg".

I would have liked to have done this in video form, but I suck at computer stuff, and so couldn't figure out how to make that happen.  So instead this will be a text and picture playthrough.  Oh well.  This will be just as good, I assure you.

"HUZZAH!!!"

When we start the game up, we're greeting with the title card, in which Mama has a gleam of murder in her eyes.  She's holding a bloody carving knife that may or may not have been previously used by Michael Meyers.  And in her other hand is the turkey, who is looking pretty sick.  I guess Mama didn't buy the pick of the litter, huh?  I also like the blood that is pouring down the screen.  Tint it green and we can have the cover of a "Goosebumps" book here.

So first we go to a main menu thing where we can either cook or look at the Bonuses.  We don't have any Bonuses yet, so let's move on.  Also, outside of the game are a series of links where you can share the game with friends (thus showing them what a complete freak you are), "Pledge to be Veg" which takes you to a Veganism contract that may or may not sign over your eternal soul, and there are links to disgusting vegan recipes.  Also now we get to hear the awful main theme of "Cooking Mama:  Mama Kills Animals", which sounds like something straight out of "Deliverance".  I'm guessing that PETA is trying to create a subtext here that you must be an inbred redneck in order to eat meat on Thanksgiving.  Well in that case you might as well call me Billy Bob McChickfucker.  (Though I respectfully ask that you never call me that.  Ever.)  At the bottom is a message asking Majesco to make a vegetarian version of "Cooking Mama"... which they haven't.  I wonder if Majesco has even bothered to give this flashgame the dignity of a response.

Let's cook!

The game now starts us on our long journey to preparing a Thanksgiving Feast.  So we start with the little cartoon turkey.  Now we have the first game:  Pluck the Turkey!

In every one of PETA's games, you have thirty seconds or something to complete the task.  I have no idea why there has to be a time limit, I'm assuming that if you don't complete the task in one minute Jigsaw's reverse bear-trap will rip your face open.  The trick here is just to click very very quickly and go from the top.  Here is where you first see the grading system.  If you're perfect you get "Meaner Than Mama!"  ...I'm not sure what this means, since you're supposed to be Mama in this game.  How can I be meaner than myself?  If you do poorly you get "Too Nice!", which at first sounds like some kind of slang to me that you're doing a great job, but actually means that you're being too gentle.  And if you suck so badly that even the game can't believe it, you get "Don't be a Saint!"  You have infinite retries, so you can always get it perfect.

By the way, who buys a turkey you have to pluck the feathers of?  Usually the supermarkets take care of that for you.  Maybe the implication is that Mama is so evil she gets a perverse sexual thrill out of mutilating a turkey herself.  Damnit, PETA, stop making fun of my mother!

This leads us to Game #2:  Remove the Internal Organs.

"Hmmm... Real home cooking!"

This time you get to reach inside the enlarged asshole of the turkey and rip out each organ one by one.  And since Mama gets off on this, she doesn't even wear gloves during the operation.  This is probably the sickest game of the entire show, and so is easily the most fun.   Its a little hard to find all the organs, because some of them are hidden inside the turkey's body.  So make sure to get real up inside there and get them all.  You don't want the Thanksgiving Feast to be ruined by somebody finding a liver inside their turkey slice, do you?  That might cause some unfortunate conversation at the table.  You also have to love the sound effects here.  It sounds just like you're ripping organs out of flesh.  ...Why would PETA know that sound?  Why would I, come to think of it?

With that done we have now completed the first phase of the game.  My score at this point was 217.  Here we get a little public service announcement called "What Mama Never Told You".  Apparently turkeys get scalded in hot water while still alive.  My only thought is:  does that make them taste better?

You know, PETA, I'm sorry, but I just cannot feel any sympathy for a turkey.  They're too delicious.  Turkeys are fine creatures, but they aren't sacred.  We're hungry people, and I don't care how many animals need to die in order to satisfy the human appetite.  Look, this is how life works:  you continue living by making something else dead.  PETA, you either suck it up or die.  Enough with the sob stories.  They also include a link a short documentary about the mass-slaughter of turkeys, which I did not watch.  You shouldn't either.

Next up, the stuffing!  First we crack the eggs.  Well, that sounds like a perfectly harmless activity.  How can PETA make it totally evil?

THE EGGS, THEY BLEED!!!

Where does PETA buy their eggs?  These eggs don't just bleed, they also leak feathers.  The Hell??  I mean, I know this game is based all around cartoon violence to dead animals, but come on!  This has gone from merely ridiculous to completely insane.  I'm starting to wonder if this honestly is a PETA propaganda piece or is actually some kind of clever self-parody of the warped way PETA sees the world.  The egg cracking game itself can be a little tough since the eggs sometimes don't want to break.  The game offers you that arrow motion, but its a lie:  the hit detection from that direction is more worthless than a veggie burger.  Instead just kinda hover the egg by the lid of the bowel and it will eventually crack.

Anyway, now we mix the ingredients.  This game isn't very hard, just grab each of the ingredients in the order the game tells you, then stir.  Its so mild in fact, I won't even include a picture.  Its boring!  Of course, the end result of the stuffing is a horrific gloopy mess that looks more like a hairball than stuffing.  Either PETA is saying that I'm a shitty chef, or they honestly think that stuffing should look like this.

Now we Stuff the Bird.

For some reason even though we removed the organs, the turkey's umbilical cord or whatever that things is supposed to be is still sticking out.  Mama doesn't care.  I bet she learned how to cook from Dr. Mengele.  This game is really easy, just pick up the nasty hairball stuffing and put it inside the bird.  The game claims that you shouldn't use too much, but there's no penalty for it.  You get the max score from putting in all the stuffing.  I was hoping that if you put too much in the bird would explode, which would have been awesome.

Next up comes my personal favorite part of preparing a turkey:  cutting its head off.

"To Jesus Christ I commend thy soul, Mr. Turkey."

The cutting games are the worst.  You have to keep the knife over the little white-dotted line and go back and forth to cut it.  Sadly PETA, perhaps in an implicit lesson of the evils of decapitating cartoon characters, made this game almost completely unplayable.  Whether or not your cuts actually will cut is entirely based on random fate.  You might as well be cutting that neck with a butter knife.  I just took whatever score I got, and left.  This PETA Cooking Mama game sucks already, I don't need to spend a year of my life trying to cut this damn turkey's head off.

Now we cook.  Finally.

I don't think that even the Colonel's twelve herbs and spices could save this meal now.

In this game you have to turn the oven and turn it off, that's it.  If you overcook it, you get "Don't be a Saint", which seems pretty stupid.  I'm not being a Saint, I'm being an ultra-sadist!  I WANT TO SEE THAT BIRD BURN!!  In fact, after playing this game for this long, I'd like to see a lot of things burn now.  I'm losing my mind here.  Just turn the oven off at the line, and you win.

Well, let's see how we've done so far:

Appetizing huh?  I call dibs on the boils.  You can tell a quality cook by the length of the arteries sticking out of the turkey's neck.  Well, at the very least, all that blood means that nobody can complain that the turkey is too dry, huh?  Clearly nobody who has made this game has ever seen a real Thanksgiving meal, leading me to wonder just where these PETA people come from.  Do they live in little vegan caves?

Since phase 2 is completed, we now get to learn more turkey facts.  Turns out that turkeys have been bred to be so fat that they can't even stand.  Will the ability to stand make them more delicious?  That's really all I care about with turkeys.  You also get a wallpaper as a Bonus, which I actually applied.  I want the world to know how much I love my evil demon-possessed Mama.  Of course, I only kiss her after bathing in Holy Water.

Phase 3 is making the Giblet Gravy.  First we chop the neck, hoping to make three parts.

"My mommy told me there would be days like this..."

This is a repeat of the last neck-chopping game, only tripled.  That basically translates to "completely fucking impossible".  You'd have an easier time trying to carve ice on the Sun then cut this damn turkey's neck.  I think this turkey might actually be descended from a hunk of US Steel.  Moving on.

Now we sauté the remaining parts.

"I nom your heart!"

This game is pretty much a repeat of the stuffing-making game.  You turn the burner on, grab the ingredients in order, then shake the pan.  One of the ingredients, I must point out is the turkey's heart.  We all know that gravy just doesn't have the right spice unless internal organs are part of the mix.  DELICIOUS!  BON APPETIT, bitch.

Now we strain the gravy for any nasty parts.  Oh like things that aren't hearts?

So now we have to reach in and grab all those fun bits like intestines, feathers, and a little cartoon dog bone.  I have to say, this sure isn't making me not want to eat meat, but I definitely don't want to play this game anymore.  Actually this game is pissing me off so much I may just become a carnetarian.  Unless my food is made entirely from the flesh of an animal, I won't eat it.  Vegetables are living things, too right?  Its completely arbitrary that we should draw the line at things that are biologically similar to ourselves.  Look, I'm not saying that veganism is nonsense... I'm just saying its nonsense.  See what it does to people?  One day you're not eating steak and the next you're programming horrible legally-questionable propaganda flash games.

Also, I have no idea just what message PETA is trying to give here.  Is Mama evil for cooking the turkey, or is it the turkey producers?  Or are we evil for eating meat?  Seems like people who starve turkeys and force them to live in kennels their entire lives are the real villains, so why are we attacking poor Mama here?  And even if Mama were the real villain, how come she's such an over-the-top horrible cook?  I mean really, PETA?  I just picked a bone out of gravy that is made partially out of organs, are you really serious with this crap?  Also, why are they torturing poor Majesco with this game?  They're just make innocent casual games about Mamas that like to cook.  If PETA has a problem with that, they're out of they're damn mind.

So now we've completed the entire meal and we get our final score.  I got 868, which is probably not the top score.  Whatever.  I'm a little confused as to the scoring anyway.  PETA hates what I'm doing to the turkey, so why is it rewording me for being cruel with bonus points?  We now get more fun turkey facts:  over 300 million turkeys are slaughtered every year.  Good, that means one turkey for all of us!  I'm glad to see our country is so prosperous.  Then the game tells us that turkeys have no legal protections.  Well... of course they don't have legal protections - THEY'RE TURKEYS.  What, are we doing to give turkeys civil rights now?  Will turkeys have the right to vote?  Will the million turkey march be coming down Washington?  When will the first turkey President be?

Now the game gets weird.  Yeah, NOW its weird.

Heel-face turn!

For some reason, I've managed to convince Mama that eating meat is bad, and now she's a total vegan hippie, spouting bullshit like "GO VEG!"  How did I do that?  This entire game I've been nothing but her accomplice in crime, helping her destroy this poor turkey and create the worst Thanksgiving dinner in the history of the universe.  Now all of sudden I've changed her mind?  I didn't even mean to!  I was on the "evil" side this entire game!  For the rest of the game we have nonsense like "Mash the Tofu", and "Turn the Tofu into a vaguely Turkey-like Lump to Fool People".

By the way, tofu is complete crap.  It has all the consistency and taste of a wet napkin.  Its not replacement for real bleeding turkey.  If I had to pick between Tofu and a turkey with boils on it, I would choose the boils.  Imagine if your mom was cooking Thanksgiving dinner and suddenly decided that she going vegan this year.  What would your response be?  Two bites into that tofu shit and you'll probably never let Mama cook ever again.  Three bites in and you'll ask to live with Dad, who's bags are probably already half-packed.

From now on you're graded by "Better than Mama!", "Not Bad!", and "Don't Give Up!"  At least the grades make sense now.  Even so, I make sure to do as bad of a job as possible, because I just don't feel right making this fake-meat nonsense.  My score for these games was something like 150 which is as low as it goes.  And here's the ending:

"Here kids, I would like for you to meet your new father.  He's a turkey."

I guess the turkey she's holding doesn't mind that she tortured and killed his brother just five minutes ago.  Now the game finally gives us its moral:  "Now that you've seen its gross to eat a turkey, TAKE THE PLEDGE TO BE VEG!"  Um... no.  I won't take that pledge.

You know what I will do?  I'm going to eat a big-ass Thanksgiving meal.  And I'll ask for seconds.  Many turkeys are going to die for my meals.  And it will be delicious.  The fact that a living soul has been sacrificed makes them taste better!  I love the smell of death!!

This game sucks.

Happy Thanksgiving!