This review is as much a cautionary tale as it is a review of a good food puzzler. You see once, dear readers, I was totally down on the cake. I disrespected it and didn't see the merits of the cake and all it's potential... until the day I snapped it off the bargain rack over at Blockbusters and gave it a try... that's when the cake proved to be good to me, and me in turn was good to the cake... then Fat Princess came and showed me how violently fun cake can be... but that's a review for another day (once they hurry up and port Fat Princess to the PSP already!)

This is Cake Mania : In the Mix, the Wii port of Cake Mania 2 (part of the Cake Mania Quadrilogy spanning Cake Mania, CM2, CM3 and Cake Mania : Main Street (the newest game released). The four games concern Jill and the world of cake making.

In the original game (which I reviewed on DS) she returned fresh from college only to find her family's bakery shut down and her family in deep financial poop. She reopened the Evans Bakery, and even send her beloved grandparents on a Hawaiian cruise (and even spent more time at the Bakery in the Back to the Bakery

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expansion which is included in the DS release).

This is CM2, in which Jill goes globetrotting for her friends' (Risha the hotness who is actually better at flowers than cake as seen in Main Street, Jack her future husband as of Cake Mania 3 & Main Street who specializes in burgers and fries, and so on including future friend Tiny the sumo wrestler who she probably met while working in that Japanese TV studio in her visit to, yes, Japan) and for herself (even going so far as visiting the future where cake is an endangered species... if you could ever consider cake a species).

The gameplay is easy enough to pick up and learn right out of the jewel case, just like the original. You control Jill through indirect manipulation (point and click things to make her do stuff). First you click the customer and get the order, then you make the cakes (once your down with the controls you can learn how to pick up one cake while putting down the next order or multiple orders once you have two or three ovens working at the same time non stop) and once they're done you frost, decorate (once you buy the decorations which is actually necessary since they add money to the sale and help you

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rack up much needed cash faster) and give them out to the customers. The game is chock full of upgradeable stuff (the first game was abit light on upgrades while this one packs it in, and the next two really packs it in but that's another review) and you can even upgrade yourself with better shoes that help you move faster (a must I assure you). And with several areas to explore including an undersea city (Bioshock?), Japan, the Antarctic and the moon (Moon the Video Game?), each area taking up a year of gameplay (more if you replay the game after every ending to get all six endings of the game) there's quite abit of gameplay involved (also there's an Endless mode where you have to cook nonstop... upgrades are hard to come by though since it's so hard to earn them in Endless, but still...)

Multiplayer too. You can team up with another player for instance, or team up with three others for multiplayer cake making... I haven't done this yet since I can't seem to get anymore than just me to play this game at one time so I have nothing to say on multiplayer... sorry.

So now that I said the upside of the game where's the downside? Hmm... if there's a downside it's

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that it's abit hard to see some of the orders when it's a three layer cake PLUS a decoration, and sometimes the game just cranks the difficulty level up too high... also did I mention when the ovens and lined up horizontally up to down the images of the cakes your baking overlay and it's hard to see what your picking up at times? These are all downers but they're also overlookable with abit of effort (replaying levels to rack up money to buy upgrades, knowing your customers (what channels they like to watch on TV to keep their patience hearts high) and so forth helps too.

Overall I am more happy and pleased with this game than disappointed, which was my original assessment when I first picked this game up. Oh I'll have negative things to say, I kidded myself. Oh this is going to be a bad review, I said while bringing this home, little suspecting how pleased I'd be with the release and how I'd go out of my way to get the entire series to review! Oh, until then (when I finally get ahold of Cake Mania 2 & 3 on the DS to review) Cake Mania : In the Mix gets 4 warm soft moist fluffy cakes out of 5.