Cooking Mama World Kitchen – Review

g-cookingmama200Cooking Mama World Kitchen

(Majesco for Wii)
By Mike Delano

The best way to approach Cooking Mama World Kitchen is to never have played a Cooking Mama game before. There’s a definite charm to preparing exotic dishes in Mama’s high-strung, cartoony world. But if you’ve played any of the previous Wii or DS titles in the series, you’ve already experienced that charm, and it’s a fleeting one in the vein of the WarioWare games. It’s great fun (especially with friends or non-gamers) to call up a few recipes and use the Wii Remote to chop, knead, slice, and filet your way through the ingredients of everything from hamburgers to octopus dumplings. There are detection issues (a wide-reaching problem for the hardware, not the game), but for the most part, the gameplay is frustration-free and satisfying in short bursts. It would be great if the Mama series could just live in one of those Wii channels that appear after you boot up the system and you could hit the kitchen for a quick fix whenever you wanted. But instead, it lives on a $50 disc, which is pretty steep for a one-note mini-game collection, no matter how charming.
(www.majescoentertainment.com)