I want to be the next top chef

You too can attend the culinary school for the gifted for a small fee of $20. The world famous Cooking Mama will turn any microwave dinner food junkie into a top chef in no time. With practice and dedication cooking mama can whip you into shape or her eyes will erupt into flames and have to clean it up for you, “Don’t worry, Mama will fix it”.

Story:
Not much of a story here. Like most of Nintendo’s weird games it doesn’t try to force some crazy story down your throat or make you watch endless videos in trying to build a back story. The story pretty much boils down to a user who wants to cook Asian type dishes all under the watchful eye of cooking mama.

Gameplay:

Medals
Bronze medal - For scoring 60-79 points.
Silver medal - For scoring 80-99 points.
Gold medal - For scoring a perfect 100 points.

The menu is laid out and you get to chose what you want to cook. The initial menu is very limited and makes it seem like the game will not be very deep.

The simplest item seems to be preparing some rice. No, this is not the uncle ben’s type preparation of opening a box and pouring the contents into a pot of bowling hot water for 10min. Any Asian household that eats rice knows you have to measure rice, wash the rice, measure the water, and let that cook in a rice cooker. In the game the procedure is:
-Measure rice (You get rice by opening a valve and pour that into a measuring cup. You have to close the valve and then click and drag that cup and release it over the cooking bowl. All this has to be done is a certain amount of time and there is a measuring line that needs to be filled to. I found this challenge very easy to do but I actually managed to spill some rice. I didn’t turn off the valve in time and missed the pot all together when dumping the rice. You can easily get gold in this event.)
-Measure water (You have another measure cup and you have to open the faucet by tapping it open/close. There is another measuring line you have to meet and within a certain time limit. For some reason this even is near impossible for me to get gold. It’s not much different from the rice measuring but I can only manage to get silver in this one as I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.)
-Mix rice (Anytime I make rice at home I always rinse the rice. This is done by filling the pot with rice and water and mixing it the draining the rice. This step is repeated until the water of the rice water is not as white. In the game they just want you to mix it and seemed to not understand that rice needs to be washed. In the even you mix by drawing a circle until a small diamond in the top screen is in the green area. I guess this is to show you can over wash rice which I thought was weird. As the time expires you have to stay in the green by drawing circles and can actually fail if you wash too much.
-Set cooking timer (last step is to set the cooking timer. Mama will let you know right after the even starts but it’s always 30 minutes. There is a large digital key pad and just tapping 30 and enter will get you an easy gold medal in this one.

All this may seem a bit too simple, but it pretty much is. The rice dish is by far the easiest to complete. After completion of dishes, it will unlock more dishes for you to cook. This dish doesn’t have as much to do in terms of real cooking as all you do is pour and wash stuff. In the other dishes you batter stuff up and dice up stuff.

Most of the menu items will give you the option to alter the main dish and add a twist to your basic run of the mill dishes. The plain rice dish can be a bamboo rice dish and this is not much harder then just making plain rice but you get the idea. Most of the time Mama will give you multiple deviations to a dish and this will drastically change the total menu count. This is one of my gripes. There is no way to tell if you have made all the derivative dishes. There should have been a menu or an indication if the menu item has finished all of the different variations. So if a menu item has 4 different combinations to it you have no way of knowing if you have unlocked all 4 of them. The game only tells you the best medal you have reached for that menu item. It would have been nice to chart every score for ever item so you can see your top scores per item. So it’s a lot like a tutorial to see if you getting better/worse over time. But instead it’s more of a “have you gotten gold” in this event yet which takes away the fun of seeing just how close you were to 100pts. Since mama is an instructor they should also let you know where you are lacking in skill so you can actually practice that one even solely.

Ever menu item you can go straight to preparing the food or going into practice mode. Practice mode is basically useless as there is no drawback to making the dish first and using that as practice. If you happen to get gold in practice you will be kicking yourself for not just making the dish and skipping practice. Practice could be more useful if it allowed you to practice a certain step versus all of them in sequence. I believe this pretty much defeats the purpose of having a practice mode at all as it add not additional tips and hits to making the dish better of even having a non- timed event.

The different methods of cooking I’ve come across are
Chopping (tapping knife), cutting (moving knife back and forth), stirring, adding ingredients, sautéing, pouring, flipping, folding, creasing, batter food, cooking time, rolling and many more. The one that I don’t understand is arranging the food. After you finish a dish on some items it allows you to arrange the food onto a plate. You can pretty much pile on a bunch of tomatoes and broccoli to give it some color and you still are able to get gold even though it looks like a mound of food. I guess the goal is to just click all the items and have it on the plate and clicking finish before the time is up. There is an option to remove items but not sure why you would do that as it really hasn’t reduced my chances of getting gold when my dish is so messy.

There is a weird little mini event where you have to add ingredients to a bowl in a certain amount of time. The thing that makes it weird is you have all the ingredients but you have to add them in a certain order. And this is shown to you by a similar item that starts off blurry and slowly clears up to become the item you need to add. So the event is to make you recognize the item before it actually fully becomes clear which one you need as time is against you. This even is fairly easy as you just have to key in on the color as the salt and pepper have different jar lids and that is a dead give away to which item they are. If you have a bunch of items that are the same color of brown then it makes it much harder to guess which item is appearing.

This is the first game I’ve played with that actually uses the microphone in game play. There are some events where you have to “blow” onto the broth and I didn’t have a clue what “blow” meant. I tried ever thing and it kept spilling or burning. Then I realized the event really wanted you to “blow” into the microphone. Now that is cool!

As you get farther you can start combining dishes for better or worse.

Graphics:
The graphics are acceptable and you can very easily understand where the style of the game is going. Both screens are used very nicely in that in some items you have to watch the top screen to know when to add ingredients and reduce heat. The menu items do resemble their real life counter parts. There is a good use of the dual screens and some events you will have to be looking at both to determine timing. The top screen is usually for time but it also turns into a procedure list too.

Pros:
Easy to pick up
Quick events to pick and finish
Good use of the stylus to cook with
You can trade with others and send demo

Cons:
No Iron Chef! (why isn’t there multiplayer?)
No scores mode
Music/Sound is very basic
Graphics don’t really push the system
Selection of food is of the Asian variety (should have more food from around the world especially BBQ)
Very hard to determine if you have unlocked all the food items