Cooking Mama World Kitchen

Product/Game Information

Platform: Nintendo Wii

ESRB Rating: Everyone

Media: Video Game

Product Features

Cooking Mama World Kitchen from Majesco brings a lot more to the table with this sequel for the Wii
Delivers all new 3D graphics, new recipes, comedic kitchen mini-games, and new gameplay modes
The Wii remote acts as your universal cooking utensil as you chop, grate, slice, stir, roll, and more
50 all new recipes include parfait, French fries/onion rings, chocolate chip cookies, ratatouille, pancakes, and more
Hilarious mini-games add a surprise, comedic element to the game

Product Details

Product Weight: 2.00 pounds

Model: 1506

Manufacturer: Majesco Sales Inc.

Release Date: 2008-11-18

Sales Rank: 299

Customer Reviews

Better graphics...worse controls!,
by Wiiviewer, 2008-12-20

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2ZW2CJD3PAGDT I review games on youtube. If you want to see more of my reviews go to youtube.com/wiiviewr.

Cooking Mama World kitchen,
by Charles W. Ware Jr., 2008-12-14

I bought this as a gift for a 9 year old girl and she adored it. She loves the game and i even enjoy playing it!!!

Maybe I'll get used to it,
by Kristin Nelson, 2008-11-26

I have never played any other version of Cooking Mama, so I can't say how it compares with previous titles. I have 9 year old twin boys, one of whom has spent many hours with the neighborhood girls creating recipes in WebKinz. They have had so much fun with that, that Cooking Mama World Kitchen (CMWK) seemed like an obvious choice for us.

A little about the game: There are three game scenarios, the first of which is "Cook with Mama" in which Mama is the cooking instructor and you are the cook-in-training. It starts with eight recipes which Mama oversees as you cook. The steps in the recipes are well defined and visually represented, with about five to ten steps per recipe, at least in the beginning. You always know where you are in the recipe and Mama gives you feedback on each step. When you have completed the recipe, you get a final overall score which results in one of four medals - bronze, silver, gold or lead. If you get a lead medal, expect to hang your head in shame and Mama will join with you. When you successfully complete a recipe in this scenario a new recipe is unlocked. Sometimes when you make a mistake a mini-game pops up to give you a chance to recover from the mistake.

The second scenario is "Let's Cook" in which you cook alone without Mama's help and serve the food to "friends" that come with the game. The visual instructions are the same as in "Cook with Mama" but you don't get rated on each step and you don't have Mama's help.

The third scenario is a competition with dual player, single player and surprise modes. This is supposed to be fast-paced and I have not tried it for reasons you will soon understand.

There is also an "Album" feature that captures your cooking mistakes for you to relive and which allows you to replay any of the mini-games you have unlocked. The mini-games aren't that exciting, lasting only a few seconds. They are a little bit more fun when they come up as a surprise in game play when you make a cooking mistake. The surprise element makes them more entertaining and the fact that they last only a few seconds makes them bearable if you get one you don't like. You don't have a choice about whether or not to play.

The first thing I noticed about CMWK is that it comes with a coupon for Nestle Toll House morsels and four of the thirteen pages in the instruction booklet are dedicated solely to real-life Nestle Toll House recipes. But that's product placement for you. There is also a Toll House cookie recipe in the game. I wouldn't really care about this except that there is one very important element missing from the instruction booklet -- instruction on using the Wii remote with this game. That's not completely fair - there is one page dedicated to "Control Icons" that gives a general description of what to do with the remote when those icons appear on the screen. But it is completely inadequate and not even printed in color. In the game, icons appear on the screen that tell you two things 1) how to hold the wii remote - normal, vertical and two horizontal positions; 2) what motion to make with the remote in that position.

Sounds easy, right? Maybe I'll figure it out on my own, but I sure wish there were better descriptions in the instruction booklet or at least on the game site. I can't find any. With seven different motions and four positions, there are twenty eight possible actions to take which represent at least twenty eight different cooking skills. It's not clear how some of them differ or exactly what they require. "Move back and forth in vertical position" differs from "tilt in vertical position" how? Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this is that the actions that do work work pretty well. Breaking an egg requires tapping it not too gently and not too hard. Cool. Forming hamburger patties means tossing them back and forth in your hands. Go too slow and you'll drop the patty, too fast and it splats on the screen. You have to find the rhythm and once you do you feel like you've got the "knack".

So far, as the title to this review states, I'm just hoping I'll catch on and get used to the movements. But for me this takes a lot of fun out of discovering the game. Instead of getting better, I'm just getting frustrated. So many other Wii games do such a nice job of coaching the player through the controls that this feels like an insult. Would it have been so hard to use four pages of the instruction booklet to describe the controls and what actions they represent and maybe only one page on printing recipes I can find on any bag of Nestle chocolate morsels anyway?