Cooking Mama, noooo! Don't do it! We love you just the way you are, in your lovely little 2D with your giant head and your madly shining eyes and your cute little flat recipes. We don't need you to go 3D. Leave that to the other genres.

Unfortunately, somewhere deep in the bowels of publisher Majesco's accounting department, people with calculators and spreadsheets and NPD reports figured they'd make more money if Cooking Mama went 3D. Hence Cooking Mama: World Kitchen, coming to the Wii this fall in gloriously unnecessary 3D. I don't know if they're right about the bottom line, but I do know that one of the best things about Cooking Mama is that she knows how to keep it simple. If ever there was a casual-friendly series that didn't need to go 3D, this was it. Seeing Cooking Mama's head on a little stick body is cute in traditional 2D. In 3D, it's slightly disturbing.

But what are you gonna do? Those aren't dumplings Majesco smells. The series was instrumental in pushing the company from a loss to a profit in the first quarter of 2008.

By the way, for an indicator of how well publisher Majesco doesn’t understand Cooking Mama, go here and click on the "See What's Cooking" and then "Infomercial" links. Watch Majesco's burly and tattooed Joe Lastnameunintelligible play an infomercial host with all the comic timing and enthusiasm of a pro wrestler. I dare you to stick it out until the "Mama's Gonna Make a Chef Out of You" march. Ouch.