Cooking Mama is my guilty pleasure!

I confess, I'm 36 years old and I love to play my Nintendo DS Cooking Mama game! I have to 'fight' for time to play it with my 7 year old because he loves it too.

About Cooking Mama

Cooking Mama is from Majesco and is a pretty cheap game for the Nintendo DS/DS Lite at only $20. They have since come out with Cooking Mama 2, so the original is lower priced. The point of the game is to master preparing and cooking up different recipes as directed by "Mama". You have to use your stylus to complete the necessary tasks and steps to create each dish like chopping, cutting, mixing, pouring and more. The game has an Asian flavor to it with Mama being an anime-style girl with brown hair and eyes the size of saucers. The dishes you create are mostly asian including fried octopus dumplings, gyoza, and sushi - but few have some western flavors to them.

Cooking Mama has the following game modes:
Let's Cook
Lets' Combine
Use Skill

In Let's Cook you create follow through a series of tasks to create each recipe. You are 'graded' on each task (ie. chopping or pouring) based on how well you do and given a score of "very good", "good", or "failed". At the end of the recipe when all the tasks have been completed (good or bad) you then get a numerical score and are given a coin based on the score. Mama is also very happy when you do something perfectly and a pop-up on the screen will tell you that you did it 'just like mama'. When you fail at a task Mama literally gets fire in her eyes and it tells you that "Mama will fix it".

A perfect score of 100 points gives you a gold coin, making a few mistakes (earning 'goods') will earn you a Silver coin, and even if you flub a task or two with failed you may end up getting a bronze coin. You can play the recipes over and over to increase your score and get a better coin if you are a perfectionist (like I am). If you are struggling with a particular task in a recipe you can put it in practice mode verses make mode repeat a task over and over until you master it. Practice mode is unscored and doesn't earn you any coins, however. I usually play it in "make" mode and just play over and over until I get it right since the practice mode gets boring to me.

There are a total of 76 recipes in all for this game, though you only start out with a dozen or so in the menu. As recipes are completed it 'awards' you by giving you new recipes to choose from in the menu. Some of the recipes and tasks are easier and have less steps while others are definitely more challenging and a game of timing. My friend recently bought this game after seeing how much fun my son had with it and she has remarkably more trouble with it than we do because she is left handed and many of the stylus motions really lend themselves more to righties. Oh, and you even get to blow into the microphone in some of the recipes to blow on the food.

The Let's Combine game is essentially the same as Let's Cook except it lets you pick two of the recipes and combine them together to make a new dish.

Use Skill tests how fast and accurate you are at doing things like making dumplings and cracking eggs (among others).

Cooking Mama is a pretty easy game to figure out, my 7 year old figured out how to play it faster than I did which was in about 5 minutes or so of messing around with it. That said, the skill level isn't all that high. I freely admit that I suck at video games and am easily frustrated when I get stuck on my other game (Zelda and the phantom hourglass). I appreciate that Cooking Mama requires relatively no thought on my part and just tests how quickly and accurately I can manipulate the stylus. I happen to love Japanese style everything so I enjoy the food choices and the cutesy graphics. Really the only thing that I don't care for is the background music. The background music is extremely repetitive and to me sounds like something out of a carnival or boardwalk game (over and over and over again).

My goal is to get a gold coin on everything and boy do I have a lot of work to get there. I seem to have a really hard time at pouring and straining out soups and pasta as well as measuring water to boil rice. On the other hand, I'm an expert at making fried octopus dumplings and can fold up a gyoza with lightning speed. When I want to de-stress, I turn to Cooking Mama. It may not be the most challenging or fancy of games, but I love it. My 7 year old son happens to agree with me and is pretty impressive at completing the recipes and tasks successfully. I like that he has to read the instructions before completing the task and follow the directions correctly. He's even more compulsive than I am about mastering the recipes so that he doesn't "get a bad coin", or horror of horrors - fail. I've also found that he's taken interest in cooking a bit since having this game. We've recently added Cooking Mama 2 to our game repetoire, so I'll be adding a review on that soon.

End note: Cooking Mama is rated "E" for everyone but has a warning for "Alcohol Reference". The alcohol reference is benign and has to do with using Cooking Sake or Wine in the recipes as an ingredient. Cooking Mama is a kid-friendly game that gets a thumbs up from my 7 year old as well as this Mama.