[QUOTE=Alienblue]In cooking momma (or Mamma, whatever) , you can't really make fun of the Octopus dumplings if this was originally Japaneses as I expect. Every seafood place in Japan sells TONS of Squid and Octopus, they are delicacies there. In comparison, Lobster is a delicacy here and a lot of people wonder how someone can eat what is essentialy a "big sea bug"! (I live in Maine; trust me, they are DELICIOUS!...I'm part vegetarian but eat seafood.) I could never kill and cook one though. As a child I remember taking "my" lobster down to the beach and letting it go!
Also, there is a typo in the second line of the review. Sure
of this am I, quite rightly, yes![/QUOTE]
Elite Beat Agents and Cooking Mama were both games released initially in Japan. Cooking Mama in Japan was a huge hit, and fit well into Nintendo's line in that country on attracting more casual gamers. My godson's sister absolutely loves it, and between that and Nintendogs, she's hardly played any of the other four games I bought her for Christmas. I am actually quite pleased that her and her mother are now playing the DS a lot with those two games. Neither one of them were very interested in playing games before, but they've become DS fanatics.
Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! was not as big a hit in Japan, but it wasn't an abject failure either. In fact, Americans were so taken with the game that the imports boosted the Japanese sales quite a bit, which is what caused Nintendo to bring an American version of it with all new dancers and content (i.e. Elite Beat Agents) to the States. Before they saw the sales figures for importing the titles, Nintendo and developer iNiS had considered the game to be one that Americans wouldn't care for.
I posted videos a while ago on a thread on this forum showing me beating the final stages of both OTO and EBA on the hardest levels and getting a perfect S-Rank on each. The hardest levels of OTO actually use American-style female cheerleaders, while the hardest mode of EBA has a trio of "Charlie's Angels" types called the Elite Beat Divas. That's one of the charms of the game is the quirkiness they are able to add respective to both the Japanese and American cultures.