Yoshi no Cookie: Kuruppon Oven de Cookie
Let's get cooking. Baking
Developer: National Human Electronics
Platforms: SFC / SNES
First Release Date: 1994
In 1994, National Human Electronics, a branch of Panasonic, developed a promotional Yoshi’s Cookie game, designed to be used with their new Kuruppon oven. Yoshi no Cookie: Kuruppon Oven de Cookie had a very limited release, with (allegedly) only 500 copies made. The game includes the SFC version of Yoshi's Cookie, as well as a new mode. This mode isn’t a puzzle game, which is why I settled on this game being secret page material. You move your little Yoshi across a town map to various buildings. There’s an odd amount of mechanics involved in navigating the map- There’s obstacles you have to jump over, shortcut tunnels to the other side, and a baffling randomly appearing blue tile that warps you to the bottom right corner. I got trapped in that corner having the tile spawn wherever I walked once and it was very annoying. It turns out you get a very strange little game when you have a consumer electronics company as the developer.
When you successfully reach one of the buildings in the upper right, you'll find yourself walking a housepet sized Yoshi around a very large kitchen. Depending on the building, you’ll have to search the cabinets for either the correct ingredients for a recipe, or the correct utensils. Don't forget to jump up to the upper cabinets for some of the items. Not being able to read Japanese, as well as the way Yoshi gets stuck on the diagonal walls when you walk against them, makes this more difficult than it seems. You’re on a timer, and there are additional enemies (roach, cat) that can take more time away from you if you don’t find the correct item to chase them off (roach house, cat food). I wouldn’t say it's fun, but it's cute. There’s a helpful dog named Michael.
The bottom left buildings give you step by step instructions on how to make three kinds of cookies in your brand new oven! One simply shows the recipes, and the other has you measure out ingredients and make the correct choices for each step. It’s fairly in-depth, and will tell you how your cookies might turn out if you mess up any of the steps. Thanks to the impressively in-depth Super Mario Wiki article for this game, I was able to follow along through this mode. The steps are animated pretty clearly, so it's easy to follow along if you'd like to bake them yourself. Hopefully no one goes purely off of the translated text, and doesn't look at the in-game demonstration for clarity!
Connie's Confections
When I saw that there was a recipe for checkerboard cookies, I knew that baking them would be my real goal for this game. Baking doesn’t come too naturally to me, but I do enjoy it. I didn’t have the time preset on my non-Kuruppon oven, so I had to make an educated guess on baking time. I may have also not properly followed the in-game steps to the letter... You're supposed to freeze the dough, but I didn't freeze it in the rectangle shape that makes it easiest to cut into perfect squares. Also, I totally missed the step saying how thin to cut the dough… and I may have used some cheap cocoa that I could barely taste. Regardless, they came out of the oven looking very cute!
No, they didn’t taste particularly good. They had an odd (American) biscuit-esque texture. I'm guessing that’s not ideal. I might take a second attempt at this, or maybe follow a non-Yoshi recipe for checkerboard cookies. Maybe I'll do that for the Yoshi's Cookie GameCube update. Or maybe I’ll just update this page again! I could just make this my secret baking blog page, if I wanted to. Stay tuned…?
Thank you for reading!
