he female Japanese voice offers me a compliment after I finish chopping my meat to make beef tips in wine sauce. Every step in the recipe always has some advice to accompany it. Mama’s English isn’t perfect, but that matches the charming and playful tone of the game, and could have been intentional. It’s actually amusing. I only wish I could say the same thing about the awkward controls in Cooking Mama.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it can be to crack an egg or add the right salt to your popcorn in this game. Given time you do grow into the controls a little, but they are not the only problem this game faces. Another one is being dull. You complete recipes to unlock more recipes. Cooking an item better and getting different medals doesn’t earn you anything.
The game is a little more fun if you are playing against a friend. You can also play against the computer and earn items for your kitchen, but you only compete with recipes you have already unlocked in single-player, and the items do nothing to change the gameplay – they just sit around the kitchen.

I kind of wish Cooking Mama had used some real recipes that you could try out in your own home. I don’t know how many people would have actually done so, but it would have added a unique sense of validity to the game. As it stands now, the cartoony graphics don’t really make you hungry or even make you feel like you actually made food, nor is the game ridiculous enough to give you that silly kind of fun like WarioWare. Any future entry in this series will probably have to go one of those two ways.