Cooking Mama – Review
Cooking Mama was released on the Nintendo DS and brought something different to the handheld gaming genre. Cooking Mama: Cook Off is essentially the same game, with a changed up gameplay mechanic due to the Nintendo WiiMote controller. The premise of the game is simple enough, under the tutelage of Cooking Mama you will follow a recipe, including all food preparation and try and make the food the best it can be. Sound odd for a console game? It is, still, odd isn’t necessarily a bad thing given as gamers many of us crave innovation.
So how does it work, essentially Cooking Mama is like a string of mini games all joined together. Imagine a recipe of sauteed onion and garlic (for simplicity’s sake). You begin by using the WiiMote to chop the onion, using a chopping motion, likewise the garlic, this is then placed in a frying pan and you jiggle the pan with the WiiMote after using butter to grease the surface. It’s all quite clever and makes good use of the WiiMote. New recipes become available as you progress and for the most part these become progressively harder and increasingly complicated. Mama will rate you at the completion of each recipe and for some reason, she’s quite terrifying when you fluff one of them.
As far as aesthetics go Cooking Mama is cartoony mixed with a little food that’s almost too realistic, it’s an odd mix, but it works well together. Looking at it from a graphical standpoint, this is the sort of game that would probably hook in that none girl gaming crowd, which is actually a little depressing. It’s bright, colorful and cute and does the job it’s meant to. Along with this the audio on Cooking Mama is just as ‘cute’, Mama’s ‘Engrish’ accent is amusing and the overall feel of the game is only added to by the audio work.
Female gamers will love this title, it is everything those jackasses on Xbox Live tell you you should be doing, in the kitchen cooking, rather than fragging. I jest obviously. There will no doubt be a certain sector of the female gamer market that do truly love Cooking Mama, but it’s more likely to be the 9 year old girl who doesn’t know what Halo is, as opposed to a veteran girl gamer. Mama is obviously the character on screen and she’s a girl, but whereas we usually bemoan the lack of female characters in games, this is sort of negated in Cooking Mama given the obvious ‘woman in the kitchen’ stereotyping of the little angry Asian cooking master.
Overall Cooking Mama is fun, for a little while, but then it becomes either just plain boring or so over complicated you really can’t be bothered to carry on. Where it does excel is in the use of the WiiMote, which puts you more in the game than the standard joypad would. Fans of mini games may well like Cooking Mama given the overall game mechanic, but should probably only pick it up if it’s on sale some place and they’re looking for a title to fill out their Nintendo Wii library.
Review by Angela
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She might be a woman in the kitchen ,but she has a big meat clever.