Well it's here, what should have been the final outing of Cake Mania... but as it turns out it wasn't. It was supposed to have ended here, and after this they would have launched a new franchise called Sausage Mania : Feeding Hungry Grannies... though I guess the appeal of grinding meat into sausages to feed granny just isn't as appealing as continuing the Cake Mania franchise, even if said franchise begins to outlive it's welcome as of Lights Camera Action (Cake Mania 5).

This is the port of the PC version of Cake Mania 3, so you know the drill if you already played that game. It's the day of the wedding between Jack and Jill (the star of the series) only someone brought a time traveling device with them to the wedding and it ends up breaking, sending the six guests (Jill's grandparents, Jill's friends who appear in the following Main Street and Lights Camera Action, and the agent who started this mess in the first place) and Jill through time itself. From the stone age upwards into a strange bizarre time lost future you must... bake cakes. And really that's about it in a nutshell, you bake cakes.

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Basically while I am planning to write addendum notes for this and other games once the DSI is in for review I have to say that this is the exact same as past games, with the exact flaws... even if the game has changed since before to try and accomidate the smaller screen. It is still laid out pretty much like the PC counterpart, but seems to have dropped a few things (a third oven, a third froster and the cake storage area) in order to accomidate the smaller screen size of the DS, and while it does seem everything is abit bigger on this version than Cake Mania 1 or 2 it is still, well, a port of a PC game so it is still small. Not as small as before but small so precise taps of the stylus is needed to perform each order.

Mostly the game is intact to a point, but again due to the limitations of the DS some things are gone. The new customers with the order wrecking quirks if not served fast enough are here, but it seems they took out the phone for phone orders due to counter space restrictions... should play through to Egypt to make sure... wow, barely into Egypt and already I hit a brick wall of hard game play on the second day there. That sucks. It was going so smoothly before only to hit a hard wall. And the way the game is set up you can't go to past days in the cave man era to rack up coins to use in Egypt. You have to do it all from Egypt which sucks. Ouch.

Thus the game hits it's only real problem. While the game is as true an interpretation as before it also has the damnable flaw of not being able to rack up coins from previous levels to ply towards your game... well after several tries I finally beat the hard day and moved on, then things got easy again... what the heck!

That is probably my only complaint about the game, the occasional hard days that make you struggle, other than that the game is solid, and is what I expect from a good Cake Mania port... of course since it is Cake Mania and nothing really much has changed except for the new gimmicks and customers you probably won't become any more of a convert playing this than, say, the last two outings. If you weren't sold on the franchise from game one or two this won't sell you now. Still if you are a fan this is for you, a nice solid four out of five silver recommendation