A fun diversion game that appeals to non-gamers.

User Rating: 7.9 | Cooking Mama DS
By Axe_336 | Review Date:
Perhaps in one of the greater strides in Nintendo's continuing efforts to appeal to a non-gamer crowd, Cooking Mama is a quick'n'quirky title that you can whip out in a gocery store line, play for 2 or 3 minutes, and put away. The concept of the game seems to be that you are a child helping your mama with the cooking (This is taken from the fact that in one mini-game you are asked to plate a dish for mama, daddy, and yourself), and the way you do this is through a variety of fun and interesting mini-games that range from insanely easy (setting a microwave), to rather difficult (Sauteing), to the seemingly impossible (Get on there faster you freakin' bread crumbs!!!). However there is only one game of the latter description, and that one is just very difficult to get perfect, actually I don't know if you can.

Another thing I like is that the dishes actually look good after you're done, so you can say to someone "Hey, I'm going to make some sushi for you." and they'll be like "Huh?" and then you show them and they're like "Whoa! What?". I've even gotten some non-gamer friends to play it and have fun with it after showing them that. Usually I get people to try it by having them make the insanely easy "Instant Ramen" (Yes, one of the dishes is a Cup-O-Noodles) and then if they aren't busy they'll usually try at least one other dish, or at least try and get the instant ramen perfect.

The only two things that can be drawbacks are these: 1. There are not really any American dishes (I mean, there's Pizza, but thats international nowadays) so when I say to someone "What do you want me to make?" and they're like "A cheeseburger!" I have to say "Well, its actually more Asian dishes." Which I don't have a problem with, since I like those kind of things, but maybe an American version would be cool? It'd probably do well in Japan too. Maybe feature Rachel Ray or that guy from Good Eats? 2. There isn't much long-term challenge. There are 76 dishes total, so its got good variety. But each dish takes, at most, like 5 minutes to make. So supposing an average of... 4.5 minutes thats going to take you about 5.7 hours to complete each dish once. Now, since you bought this game you're probably going to want to ty and perfect each dish, so maybe double that number to 11.4. And maybe stretch it to 15 for novelty factor. Okay, 15 hours is about the time that you start to realize "Oh.... I've done pretty much everything in this game." So, its still fun to whip out and play for brief spurts sometimes (Which is aided by the fact that DS loads up really fast compared to PSP which takes, in my experience, about double the time to load up.) and to show off, but not so much with the sitting there and playing it for a long time. And you don't really get anything for your eventual completion.

So, here's the run-down:

Good stuff:
Fun
Easy (mostly)
Only $20
Great short term boredom killer
Appeals to non-gamers.
Its got Mama in it, and she rocks.

Reasons you might not want it:
You run out of novelty pretty quick.
Lack of American dishes (I guess)
Lack of long term single player type challenges.

Other:
My one other thing is, when I saw previews and Mama had flaming eyes for your failure I was like "Oh sweet, she gets really pissed off at you for failing" but all she says in the English is "Don't worry, Mama will fix it." and I was like "What? That doesn't warrent flaming eyes at all!" But, oh well.

So yeah, for $20 its definitely a good deal.

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