Cake Mania: Main Street is typical Cake Mania fare. You can expect bright and cheerful music, colorful scenery and interesting customers, to say the least. You'll have four different areas to work in and each is nicely decorated and pleasing to look at. My favorite is Tiny's Sumo Sushi because it has a very zen feel to it.

The funniest thing in the entire game is the greeting you'll get from each patron. The Super Hero guy says "hallo" is a very dumb guy voice, and then there's the African American lady that reminds me of Oprah in her heavier days. She says "heeeeeey" in a very Southern fashion. The tough mob guys walk in and greet you with "Yah, see?" as in, "Yah see, sonny. I'll fill you full o' lead!" It's great stuff and it's the little touches that mean so much. The anime-styled cat girl squeals in a very cat-like fashion, plus there's the ominous vampire guy and the mysterious headless guy in a trench coat that ends up being a young child hiding underneath. The ninjas make a quiet but threatening "clink" sound that can only be them readying their throwing stars and Risha, Jack and Jill all sound like they should. Really, the sound effects help sell the game completely, over and above the fantastic gameplay.

Cake Mania: Main Street is the most ambitious Cake Mania DS title to date. A mega-mall has moved into Bakersfield, Jill's hometown, and they are taking over. Jill, with the help of Jack, Risha and Tiny, determine to take back the town and drive the mall out of business by opening a few well-managed Mom & Pop businesses. First, you'll work through Evans' Bakery doing standard Cake Mania tasks. Your customers will come in, you'll prepare their cakes as ordered, serve them and collect their money. Once you have worked through a handful of levels, Jack's Burger Barn becomes available to you. You can continue working your way through Evans' Bakery or you can start on working through Burger Barn.

Here, things are a little bit different. You'll have 4 placemats in front of you. A customer will appear and you must click on them to give them a menu. They will then place their order. You have to cook and build their burger in the correct order, then collect their money. The catch here is that, at first, you'll only be able to make one type of sandwich. As you progress and make money, you'll be able to buy additional recipes which will, in turn, make more money. Once you have progressed a good bit through the Burger Barn, you'll open up Risha's Flower Shop.

Risha's Shop is similar to Evans' Bakery, at least in your tasks. Instead of baking cakes, you are building bouquets. It never gets more complicated that 2 flowers per arrangement, but when you add in the possibility of ribbons and decorative items, it can get hairy. My only complaint here is that there was never any instruction on how to combine flowers to make a bouquet. While it may seem simple, at first, I thought each one needed to be wrapped in paper and then combined and I wasted a lot of precious time before accidentally putting two together flowers before wrapping one in paper. After you have made some progress in Risha's Flower Shop, you'll open Sumo Sushi operated by Tiny. This works a lot like the Burger Barn in that you have 4 placemats and customers will order rice, noodles and eventually, elaborate sushi creations.

One of the things I really enjoyed was the storyline progressions in between levels, especially Tiny's story. There were also some humorous recipes like The Chuck, which you don't actually eat. It drop-kicks it's way down your throat and you hope it doesn't take your teeth with it. Funny stuff.

Cake Mania: Main Street is standard Cake Mania stuff. Therefore, it isn't difficult but it does ramp up in challenge as you progress. In past DS versions of Cake Mania, I have found that certain recipes were very difficult to make because I couldn't clearly see the tiny decorations on them or rather, several of them were very similar in color or design and it could cause me to make the incorrect cake. Now, things are much easier to see and they also utilize the top screen to show a larger picture of the customers and their orders. That way, you can clearly see what cake design they want or the specifics of their burger or sushi recipe. Oddly enough, when you have two customers at once and they have two cake orders, the cakes appear in reverse order on the top screen. At first, it threw me a bit, but once you realize it, it's not a big problem.

There were a few things that could occur during gameplay such as the mobsters could take your customers' money if you don't retrieve it fast enough or the vampires could turn all of the other patrons into vampires as well, and this did happen to me once, but honestly, I didn't see much of a difference other than the visual change. Their orders didn't change as has been done in past PC games, so it really didn't bother me.

Cake Mina: Main Street is all about the stylus. You'll tap to acknowledge a customer and give them a menu, tap to start their cake baking or burger cooking or flower order processing. You'll tap to build their item by combining different items and you'll tap to pick it up and deliver it to the customer. Finally, you'll tap to retrieve their money. You'll also tap to obtain upgrades between levels, buying faster equipment or faster shoes to speed things up. Extras like TVs, cookie makers and drinks help to keep the peace if your patrons start getting restless.

You can also make upgrades to the 4 businesses by spending your hard-earned cash. If you fully upgrade each building, you not only earn a Trophy for viewing in the Trophy section, but you earn more money per level and they get a visual bump on the main map.

With 25 levels per businesses totaling 100 levels of gameplay over 4 different game types, you can see why I say this is the most ambitious title yet. While it's not pure Cake Mania through and through, I really liked that the developers mixed things up a bit. All four gameplay types are fun and there is lots of gameplay to be had here. Highly recommended.