All that cooking and no cleanup- Cooking Mama for Nintendo DS

One of the Nintendo DS games that has been on my kids' list is Cooking Mama. When I had to order a new cordless phone from Best Buy, I went ahead and picked this game up as well. I paid $19.99 for it. It is rated E for everyone, but I will mentioned cooking wine and sake are some of the ingredients, but that's not a big issue with me (yeah I cook with wine too).

You're a chef in training under Mama in this game, and you use your stylus to chop, grate, mix, cut, stir, knead, blend, tenderize, mash and a few other things in this game. You have to follow Mama's instructions to a T to meet her approval, and get a good score, so you may unlock even more recipes.

While whittling away at the recipes, you are graded, with very good, good, or a big fat failed, but you never have to start over completely with a recipe, because Mama will ‘fix' it if you happen to mess up. What's funny is when you fail, mama's nice, happy expression turns to literally- fire coming up in her eyeballs and she has steam coming out of her ears.

You start off the game with 15 recipes, stuff like spaghetti, soup, boiled eggs, and sandwiches. Complete those games with a silver metal or higher and you can unlock 61 more recipes- which we have yet to finish yet. These recipes get more and more advanced like pork cutlet, fried shrimp, octopus dumplings, and so on.

The Let's combine part of the game is where you can mix two recipes together and create a new dish. The Use skill portion is where you can use the skills mama has taught you in sort of a speed version of the skill- like you see how many shrimp you can peel in a certain amount of time or how fast you can chop onions.

Some may consider this a little too repetitive, but for me it's a nice game and a nice way to relax, and it's not some big, ongoing, complicated story that you keep having to progress in. My kids like it as much as I do and even though I bought it  for them, I find myself playing it pretty often too. I do find that the background music is a little twerpy for me though, it can get stuck in your head too. Overall, I would recommend this game.