HeadWillCollapse

Fat Conan and I have been playing “Cooking Mama” on the DS this week. It’s the first thing to get us excited about cooking since the dawn of Nigella Lawson (ah, Nigella; you may have the unnerving height and unconvincing lady-name of a Soho transvestite, but you could clarify our butter any day). While “Cooking Mama” doesn’t stimulate quite the same parts as the aforementioned kitchen kitten, it does hit all the marks you could want in a fusion of Warioware and Gordon Ramsay’s “the F-Word”. It’s fun, it’s actually pretty tough and Mama (of the title) seems easily riled for a game that’s aimed squarely at kids. Don’t get me wrong though: Mama gets quite irate, but manages to fall short of the sweary rages that Mr. Ramsay is capable of spewing upon his staff.

“Don’t worry Mama can fix it” is not something likely to be seen on his show, at least not without the phrase “you useless c**t bag” appended angrily to the end of it. The game consists of a series of recipes which you must cook-up by completing a corresponding series of culinary mini-games. These little tasks range from peeling vegetables to creating stock and are short, enjoyable distractions which give the game a great dip-in, dip-out appeal. The recipes, on the other hand, mainly offer no appeal at all. In keeping with the Japanese eccentricity the game exudes, the recipes come in the form of a combination of European and quirky Japanese cuisine. The result is a set of reasonably detailed instructions that could conceivably allow you to create these gastronomic masterpieces in your own kitchen; presumably before throwing your achievements in the bin, dog’s bowl or any container that would save you from inflicting them on your maw. For example, FC and I don’t believe anything referred to as a “batter cake” (which sounds like a delicious crepe or pancake to us) should contain either shrimp or cabbage. Mama disagrees.

Going one step further, the combination mode allows the player to mix recipes (and their corresponding mini-games) to create some positively nauseating fusion food. Some of the combinations possible make Buster Blood-vessel’s “Pork-pie in a jar of pickled onions” shake look like the Michelin starred tucker it always strived to be. Overall “Cooking Mama” is a bright, fun and downright odd addition to the DS’s catalogue. It has an almost inexplicable appeal and makes me wonder if the DS had been around when FC and I were boys that perhaps we wouldn’t be living on Super Noodles and take out today. Of course, if we’d all been eating sensibly and weren’t carrying around a little excess man-coating then we wouldn’t have any reason to hate Gillian McKeith. And that would be a dull world indeed.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 1:21 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.