More fun with Friends

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good clean fun

Cons: Repetitive recipes, mama's voice is very obnoxious

The Bottom Line: 
It's definitely worth playing and is great for get togethers, but you can get away with renting it.

Author's Review
As someone whose culinary ability is limited to making Ramen noodles in the microwave, I was surprised how much I enjoyed Cooking Mama.  The premise is simple: cook various dishes using the wii remote as a representative of a utensil.  The recipes are varied, from desserts to salads to dinners.  Though for some reason all the American food is kind of lame (think hot dogs and burgers) and you make some things that sound kind of gross (squid ink pasta, anyone?)  there's a good assortment of dishes to make and you unlock more as you master the recipes. 

The gameplay is fun and intuitive and for a game about cooking my friends and I actually get really involved in it.  Unfortunately, a bunch of the recipes repeat the same steps.  For example, all the desserts use the techniques: egg cracking, yolk separating, baking, etc.  This can get rather repetitive and if you're playing by yourself it can get dull after a while.  Some of the steps aren't very intuitive and can only really be learned by playing it repeatedly, such as when you're frying ingredients in a pan and need to judge the right times to add them, and it took me an embarassingly long time to figure out just the right way to separate a yolk.