Since I have never played Cooking Mama for the DS, but have heard tons of good feedback about it, I was waiting for the Wii version, which had me curious and excited about using the Wii-mote as a series of kitchen utensils.
Cooking Mama: Cook Off is basically the DS game brought to the Wii, with some added features. In this cartoony cooking simulation, you prepare a variety of dishes by completing a series of mini-games. Each of the mini-games represents a part of the preparation of the whole meal.
The Wii remote is used to imitate real movements such as chopping, slicing, grinding, stirring and kneading. To chop something, you will be moving the Wii-mote quickly up and down; to grind meat, you use it as the grinder handle and move it in circles; to stir, you do exactly what you would do if you were holding a spoon.
The game offers 55 different recipes that use over 300 ingredients. Initially, you only have a small amount of dishes available to prepare, but as you successfully finish a dish, you gain access to new and more complex recipes in the cookbook.
The ingredients are fully 3D rendered and look realistic enough, but with a cartoony twist. The realism comes from the actions you perform on the ingredient itself. Whether you gut and prepare a fish, slice a large piece of meat, dice some vegetables or peel a carrot, season your food with salt and pepper, shake a frying pan to stir your food so it won’t burn… the movement you have to do is indicated on the screen.
The most complicated part for me was the stove mini-games. To cook certain things you have to dump the prepared ingredients on the frying pan and then shake it now and again so they don’t burn. The thing is, every ingredient has a different cooking time and you don’t really know how long that is, so usually it would end up with some things not cooked enough while others were overcooked. It was just too weird.
The other involved adding certain seasonings, changing temperature on the stove burner or oven and stirring the food. You have to time the actions according to what comes sliding along the bar and do the right thing at the right time. For some reason, the controls for this were flaky, especially for turning the heat up or down.
Depending on how well you do with your recipe and how quick you complete it, you are awarded a score and a medal, plus some encouraging words (or not) from Mama. These actually got me going “what the heck did she just say there?” a number of times… Mama speaks “Engrish”, which is usually funny, but due to the shortage of varied comments, it quickly became repetitive and annoying. Eventually I found out the sentence I couldn’t understand meant “Better than Mama!”
The game offers five modes to play in. Practice is for you to get used to the controls of a particular recipe and play single preparation steps or the whole thing. Make It means you have to go through all the steps in order to finish the recipe and awards you with a medal at the end, like an average calculated according to your individual scores for each step of the recipe. Challenge mode is like Make It but without the little breaks in between preparation stages.
In Friends and Food of the World you get to cook recipes from ten countries in a cooking “duel” against the virtual friend from the country of the recipe you chose. They’re nearly perfect in their cooking, so you better have some serious control of your Wii-mote and know your recipes before you play this mode. If you win, you get a new kitchen utensil. If you lose, you usually get something to decorate your kitchen with.
The two-player mode in Cooking Mama: Cook Off is the best thing about the game. In Friends and Food you go head to head with a real friend and have your cook-off against each other. Both “Friends” modes are played in a horizontal split-screen mode, but this is actually the strongest point in the game since you’re playing against someone who is not perfect, unlike your nearly impossible to defeat AI friends of the world.
Although at first I was really excited about the game and how it would be so much fun with the Wii-mote, my enthusiasm winded down considerably after about ten recipes. The controls were strangely temperamental, sometimes even unresponsive, especially when stirring and kneading. What I thought was supposed to be a really fun experience became frustrating and annoying a bit too fast.
Breaking virtual eggs, shaping make-believe meatballs or making cartoony puddings could have been a much better and fun experience. I think I’d rather be in the real kitchen getting my hands dirty than play Cooking Mama: Cook Off again. At least I know that in there I can do better than Mama.