Cooking Mama – Nintendo DS

This is a very cute game for the DS. A good one if you’ve just purchased a DS and want a game that really shows you what a stylus can do. 😉 Some recipes are kinda easy, while others proove more challenging. I’m still working on peeling potatoes fast enough. The graphics are very amuzing. I laughed out loud as I spilled water all over the place while trying to drain some pasta. The meals are japanese based…and make you want to go out and make your own gyoza! This is very fun for an adult who likes DS mini games, and it doesn’t seem too ‘kiddish’ as I had feared. I’m so glad this unique japanese game made it to the states. Two thumbs up for Cooking Mama!

Having recently purchased a DS lite for my seven year old we let him choose his games. Being like most boys he picked a Mario title and a Sonic title. I jokingly commented to my husband I wanted to try Cooking Mama. The game is mine! Or so I thought when he brought it home for me a few days later.

I started playing right away and was quite amused by the cute little graphics, annoyingly catchy music and Mama’s firey eyes when I messed up on my Fried Octopus Balls. The mini-game style and chances to practice each technique before making them kept me entertained to the point of taking the DS with me so I could play at random places outside my home. Until of course I laid it down one night (my thumbs were sore from hours of perfecting my Miso Soup) and my husband picked it up. Hearing him curse at the cheery little Mama and his over-cooked chicken was more amusing than watching him throwing his console controllers. Next my son got his hands on the game, it is HIS DS afterall. Soon it was his favorite, Mario and Sonic long forgotten.

I never thought this game would become a family favorite. I expected it to wind up lost somewhere in the stacks of other games. Instead everyone in our family takes turns preparing all these odd Japanese dishes and earning new ones. While very repetative and at times frustrating we’ve all really enjoyed it. If you’re looking for a family friendly game for all ages I would reccomend this game a thousand times over.

I won’t say that Cooking Mama is the best game I’ve played in recent months. Surely, there’s something more important than cooking – like, killing zombies on the X360, for example. However, it’s certainly the most innovative, especially when you consider how much you can do on the limited dimensions of a Nintendo DS touch screen.

In Cooking Mama, you’re an apprentice in the fine art of cuisine management. Your master, a certain Mama, will put you through a series of saliva-inducing recipes, and will grill you through the preparation of each as if it’s the only thing you live for. You can choose to practise before hand, but when you go into the actual process of making a particular food, you’ll find that there’s no room for error. A wrong move, and Mama will not hesitate to show you her wrath.

Making a food involves several steps. Some are short, while some may take forever. For example, when preparing a pan-fried fish, you’ll have to go through the coating of the fish slices, the melting of the butter, the actual pan-frying and the arranging of the plate. Each process in turn involves different ways of doing things. Coating the fish slices, for example, requires you to drag your stylus in a left-right manner while touching the fish. Melting the butter requires you to rapidly drag the butter in a circular motion when it’s on a hot plate. Pan-frying involves a “following the command on-screen” mini-game that requires you to perform whatever Mama tells you to, and so on.

The impressive thing here is that, even though you’re just stroking your stylus throughout the game’s 70+ recipes, you’re essentially doing different things. It’s a bit like Trauma Centre from last year, but instead of seeing body parts, you’re looking at food. If you’re more adventurous, you can even combine recipes to form new ones, which adds depth to the gameplay.

For a game as quirky as this, it’s understandable that it uses quirky graphics. The presentation of Cooking Mama is light-hearted, and makes the hectic process of cooking (to me, at least) much more enjoyable. The music is a little weak, even though it does have some nice variety. But seriously, graphics and audios are not what you’d buy this game for. I mean, who cares about these things when you’ve Fried Octopus Balls to make?

For its sheer audacity in bringing the kitchen onto the DS, I’d recommend Cooking Mama to every owner of the DS. Don’t expect to see your DS in a few weeks, however, if you bought this game, and have a missus in the house. Now, if only my wife can learn a few tips out of this.