Nintendo Wii - Cooking Mama: Cook-Off

Format
Nintendo Wii
Publisher
505 Games
Developer
Office Create
Country of origin
Japan
Genre
Mundane simulation

Cooking Mama : Cook-Off

By David Rasmussen
16th Jun 07

Cooking.
It’s something you just have to learn to do, because unless you plan to eat cold food forever, cook out of the microwave for life, or live your life from the dollar menu of McDonalds (or some other fast food place) then you’re not going to make it long without cooking skills. Of course if you had the money of Donald Trump you could have a TGIFriday built into your mansion and have them cook for you 24 hours a day, but since this game isn’t called “Donald Trump’s TGIFriday Building Simulator”, we’re going to learn some advance techniques for cooking in Cooking Mama : Cook-Off.

Much like Trauma Center, this game started it’s English language life on the Nintendo DS (with the same concept as it’s DS counterpart, much like how Trauma Center : Second Opinion is much the same as Trauma Center : Under The Knife but with some added levels and a new character)… of course if you were to look at the origins of cooking games, however, you have to look all the way back to the PSOne and it’s old school cooking game that only saw release in Japan. But that was with a PSOne controller, and it was not the most precise though it was workable. Now, with a Wiimote, can you cook better? Let’s find out.

If you are not familiar with the series here’s a brief synopsis.
Mama is Japanese… duh… and Mama thinks it’s time you learned how to cook on your own, so you’re off to learn the ancient art of cooking via the not so ancient Wii-mote. Cooking doesn’t sound like much, except for the fact the last halfway decent cooking sim (only one before this one) was that PSOne one that only saw Japanese release!
But look, see how far cooking sims have evolved since then as you’ll find cooking with the Wii-mote is light years ahead of using the old PSOne controller. It’s still not perfect, but at least it’s improved.

Like it’s PSOne counterpart, you’ll cook through the workings of many mini games. Each game, much like it’s PSOne counterpart, handles a specific task in cooking. Chopping food stuff, boiling, peeling, wok-ing (yes, wok-ing), baking, mixing and so forth.
Each part of the cooking is handled through a specific mini-game, some easy some hard to master, all you control through the one-handed use of the Wii-mote. What? Why not two handed cooking? According to the box apparently the Wii-nunchuk is not used in this game, despite the fact the nunchuk might have offered up a second hand to work the cooking with. If you’re missing a second nunchuk for your spare controller that’s a good thing, but again maybe the Wii version should have considered adding it for finer control and manipulation of the game. Just a thought.

The results of this game is that you have an experience that, in theory, is easy to explain but not always easy to learn. While the instruction given to the game in the Practice mode is… well… simple enough, it is half of the time too simple and without any depth. This is bad especially when you tackle harder tasks and the simple instructions fail to fill you in on all the nuances of each cooking tasks. For instance, certain tasks you should NOT follow the instructions (like stirring), especially when it tells you to point the controller up or down (only a few occasions, through trial and error, you’ll find the specifics recipe mini-games it’s safe to hold the controller up or down). For stirring or mixing, for instance, pointing straight at the screen and performing quick sharp spins of the Wiimote works better than the slow movements shown on the instructions.

Other aspects require either a specific use of force (cracking eggs) or certain movements (separating yellow and whites or chopping), while more lack depth of instruction to open up additional methods (for instance it’s possible to flip your ingredients while using the wok or pan if you can master your “handling” of the pan (once you get keeping the pan shuffling down it’ll be a short step to flipping your food)).
Add to that the somewhat sharp cooking curve (things burn easily, some mini games have entirely too finicky controls which makes it near impossible to pass, etc) and you have a mixed bag controlwise. It’s an improvement over the PSOne, but it also has room which a future version of this game can be improved on in terms of control sensitivity… for instance maybe it’d be nice if the game actually took into account the Wii’s setting for your control sensitivity to start off (because no matter what you set the sensitivity of your Wiimotes on the game seemingly doesn’t seem to take that into account during gameplay).

There are three modes in this game. These play quickly and you pretty much can see what this game has to offer you in one sitting (not a good thing if this game was gunning for depth of content).
The first mode is for cooking, practicing cooking and learning cooking.
This is important, and the first mode you’ll crack into, as you’ll need to master each and every recipe in order to use each in turn in the other two modes. This, by the way, is not so easy as unlocking recipes through the “Make it” mode can be abit hit or miss unless you take the time to practice it (and master it).

Also without the presence of a cookbook to thumb through the only way you‘ll know if you really mastered a recipe or not is by playing the other two modes (and checking the list of available recipes to use) for yourself. Not good especially if you were set on using a particular recipe only to find that it hasn‘t been “recorded“ into your cookbook yet. Also some of the recipes the game teaches you is rather… pedestrian. Like popcorn, hot dogs or hamburgers, with certain recipes so short you wonder why they were even put into this game in the first place. A good example of this is popcorn… let‘s see… pop the corn, salt the corn… and that‘s it. Yeah. That was so important to put this non-recipe into the game. Maybe next game they’ll put in a recipe for toast.

The one true crime of this game, however, is that while the game boasts the use of 300ingredients it does NOT support a mode capable of creating unique individual recipes. With all these ingredients you’d think that would be the order of the day for Cooking Mama, what with you supposedly learning to cook and all, but this is not the case. In fact of these 300 ingredients quite a few seem to be rather interchangeable mini-game wise, being nothing more than a part of a mini-game without any real presence short of just being there for said recipe. Without the ability to mix and match ingredients, using them to create new recipes, the game falls short of what could have been a perfect score.

There is also a challenge mode, but don’t expect to crack into it right away because it is hard! Because it gives you a set amount of time to follow through every step of the recipe without missing a single step, there is pretty much no chance to get this the first time (especially since the slightest mistake can mess up the whole effort and you‘d end up having to repeat it over again).

The second mode (the first of two which requires you to master cooking each of the game’s paltry 55 recipes before you play) of the game is competition against the “masters” of the world.
Ten chefs from ten countries of the world will challenge you in split screen cooking. Once you beat each you’ll win a gold kitchen item, but then again maybe you’d like to lose because if you lose you win another kitchen item… so you should win and lose once again each of these masters.
If there is a downside to this (and it seems there’s a lot of thorns to go along with the pretty roses of this game) it’s that you have to play through the first mode of the game in order to rack up recipes to use in this mode, then you can only use the recipes of each country against it’s chef (there’s no mixing of styles here like in Iron Chef the original series), and once you beat each this mode becomes a little pointless (no new chefs are unlockable past the 10).

The final mode brings a little more life into the game, with 2 player mode. However without the use of WiFi to challenge players over the net this mode is abit limited.

The main selling point of this game is it’s cooking mini-games, but this is also the main killjoy of the game. It’s kinda fun, it’s abit interesting, but it’s also a nitche game and it’s not the easiest to grasp… and of course once you grasp it (and all 55 recipes which is actually less than then Nintendo DS version’s available recipes) it’s abit short to play. Sure, there is two player but that doesn’t bring much life into the game.

For a sequel, however, I expect more from Nintendo before I rave about this franchise.
The game needs a WiFi capability to play against players online.
The game needs a system to allow for the creation of original unique recipes using the 300 or so ingredients the game will offer.
The game needs more depth in it’s instructions so that it doesn’t experience the occasional steep learning curve here and there.
The game needs more modes, and more depth by which to keep players playing.
And finally the game needs abit more spirit. I liked Mama and all, but I wish the game was abit more spirited or actually had a storymode (maybe a Cooking Career mode) to compel you to master your cooking moreso than you were motivated in this game.

Long story short, for being a limited nitche game with little appeal past it’s quirky non-conformist gameplay it has the potential for greater things but isn‘t experiencing said greatness right now.
Being a nitche game, not so easy to master with little motivation to really master said game other than you like the cooking mini games (and even that can only carry you so far)… Cooking Mama : Cook-Off gets an average 3 popcorn cooking lessons out of 5 for it’s middle of the road appeal factor.
May it’s sequel appeal to you more than this, because the last we need is more of the same old cooking.

-- David Rasmussen 16th Jun 07

Nintendo Wii Cooking Mama: Cook-Off Images