Hey Good Lookin', Whatcha Got Cookin'?

You’d never know it from my regular diet (where bowls of cereal frequently make appearances at dinner), but I actually do like to cook – it’s just that most of the time, I don’t have the spare time or the energy to devote to all the washing, chopping, boiling, and sauteing that goes into making a dish from scratch. Fortunately, there’s Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS, which gives me all the satisfaction of preparing a meal in about 90 seconds.

Practice Your Skills

In this game, you use your stylus to perform various timed cooking tasks, which all add up to a complete entree. To familiarize yourself with the techniques, you’ll probably want to start with Use Skill, which teaches you many of the tasks that you’ll be using. You can practice drawing lines across meat and vegetables to “chop” them, coating meat in flour, peeling potatoes, and so on. This is also a good place to come and practice a skill if there’s one particular step that’s keeping you from successfully cooking a dish.

Let's Cook!

The main mode, Let’s Cook, starts with a few simple recipes (think hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches). You’ll go through various steps to prep your ingredients, although the cooking step can be as easy as setting the timer on the microwave or a more involved, rhythm-based set of tasks (mixing, adding ingredients, blowing on the microphone to cool the food). After you make a dish, it is graded, and awarded a bronze, silver, or gold medal; you can always re-cook a dish to get a better score. As you cook meals, the game unlocks new recipes – there are a total of 76 meals, although many of them bear striking similarities (pork curry, curry and rice, curried pilaf, etc.) There’s also a Let’s Combine mode, where you can mix and match items from the standard menu to create your own customized dishes. Fried chicken fried rice, anyone?

Graphics & Sound

Cooking Mama has cartoony, anime-style graphics - Mama herself is an impossibly cute teen girl whose eyes blaze with flames when you fail at your designated task. The recipe menu has miniature icons of the dishes, and it's pretty hard to tell what most of them are until you click on the item for the description. Within the cooking tasks, the food graphics are better - the cuts of meat, in particular, have impressively realistic marbled texture and color.

The music is both insanely cheery and maddeningly memorable - I have it stuck in my head as I'm typing this, in fact. The sound effects seem pretty accurate for the most part, like chopping, peeling, and boiling noises. It would be nice if there were a way to turn off the music, but since you rely on sound cues to know whether you've succeeded or failed, it's not as simple as turning the volume all the way down.

The game is pretty responsive, and the stylus works very well for the most part at performing the individual tasks – though peeling potatoes is particularly frustrating. Some of the tasks don’t clearly explain what the ideal result is, so it’s trial-and-error to figure out what separates “good” from “very good.” If you fail at a step, it doesn’t automatically ruin the dish, but you won’t get a gold medal unless you get a perfect score of 100.

Many of the American-style recipes are prepared in amusingly non-American ways, often with oddball ingredients (macaroni & cheese includes a hearty helping of shrimp, scallops, and mushrooms). I’m about halfway through the game and I haven’t seen any desserts yet, which is disappointing. The limited range of ingredients and the similarity of the dishes makes this game best for playing in short, 10-to-20-minute sessions – after that, it becomes repetitive and somewhat boring. If I wanted to stand around chopping and cooking for half an hour, I’d go and make myself a real dinner in the kitchen. But for a quick, fun little game that doesn’t require a lot of time commitment and provides instant gratification, Cooking Mama will whet your appetite.