Cooking Mama: Cook Off

Cooking Mama achieved much success on the DS and now has made it's way across to the Wii. A collection of cooking-themed mini-games, Cooking Mama made good use of the touch-screen and now makes use of the Wii remote.

The meal is split up into a series of mini games to represent each stage of preparation. For example, a dish may be Stage 1: peel vegetables, Stage 2: chop vegetables, Stage 3: Skin fish, Stage 4: butter up a frying pan, Stage 5: cook all in frying pan.

Each game uses simple gestures on the remote like moving up and down to chop vegetables, or making a circular motion to stir. There are 55 different dishes but you will be playing the same sections repeatedly since many dishes involve the same sub-tasks such as cutting vegetables.

At the end of each task, the game's mascot; Mama, grades you on your performance and time. The scores don't seem to have much flexibility. For example, if you're frying two items and each item can basically be 'perfect', 'OK', or 'overcooked', then you would expect cooking one item 'perfect', and one item 'OK' would achieve 75/100 but instead you get 50.

Due to the repetitive nature and the inaccuracy of the scoring system; it doesn't give you enough motivation to play the recipes repeatedly, but the game is shallow anyway; so gets boring very quickly.

The motion controls aren't perfect and some controls aren't sensitive enough such as kneading dough, and some games require extremely exaggerated movements to register properly. The graphics are basic but function well enough and Mama is really irritating because you will hear the same annoying phrases numerous times. The text in the game isn't written well either, so it all comes across as a budget Japanese game which it ultimately is.