Navarro gave the game, released in November 2007, a 6/10, or "Fair" score. "...If you played last year"s game and prefer a bit more forward progress from your sequels, you can safely leave this one alone," he wrote.

A Majesco employee responded in part, "With the first Cooking Mama DS reaching 1 million  units in Europe and near 1 million Stateside, I began to worry that this might begin to go to our heads.

"Majesco"s parking lot would be flooded with Bentleys, Maybachs and rare hybrid cars that run on pure ego. This is no longer my fear.

"So I tip my hat to you good sir for keeping us grounded. God knows we are indeed all financially well off and not a bunch of hard working people just trying to pay our bills."

There"s more in the full letter over at passiveagressivenotes.com (a pretty funny site on its own).

It"s always interesting to hear the other side of game reviews. Next-Gen ran a few "Reviews Post Mortems" a while back, including this one from Atlus after Steambot Chronicles was released.

Regarding complaints of Steambot"s controls, the Atlus rep quoted a co-worker who said, "...the control scheme is similar to that of Virtual On, and nobody bitched about that."

I wish that more publishers would be willing to respond to reviews more openly, but in my experience pitching the Reviews Post Mortem idea to game makers, they often felt that being put on the defensive in public wasn"t in the best interest of game sales, and would just bring more attention to bad review scores.

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