E3 2008: Cooking Mama World Kitchen Hands-On

While we've always enjoyed cooking food in Mama's kitchen, we've always found her to be something of a disapproving head chef. Descending from the Gordon Ramsay school of motivation, she's always been a little too eager to cut us down for making mistakes. Cooking Mama World Kitchen looks set to change all that, as Mama takes you on as an apprentice.

There will be 50 recipes in the final game, but we only got to play through the single burger recipe on the E3 stand. As you'd hope, you interact with the game using the Wii Remote's motion-sensitive controls, performing similar actions as you would in a real kitchen. The first part to making a burger is to mince the meat, placing the raw ingredients into the machine and then slowly turning the handle to grind them up. If you turn the handle too fast, you'll snap it off, but unlike in previous Cooking Mama games, the game won't end there if you make a mistake. You'll lose some time, but you won't fail the recipes as easily in World Kitchen.

There are also some cool minigames to play if you fail a certain segment. For example, if you flip the burger too energetically, it goes flying off, and you have to race to catch it by shaking the remote control. If your dog gets to the patty first, then he'll eat it before you have a chance to catch it. There are also times when you need to shout for Mama's help, again by shaking the remote, and if you're energetic enough, she'll come and help you out.

There were many steps in our burger recipe, with smaller details, such as greasing the frying pan, all included. The final stage is presenting the food on the table, and you're awarded points for your presentational style. Cooking Mama World Kitchen will have a simultaneous release worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2008. We look forward to finding out what other recipes Mama has planned, and hopefully we'll find out more of what's on the menu in the coming months.