Cooking is something I enjoy doing in my spare time, so it was only natural that would play Cooking Mama. While it hadn't gotten the most amazing reviews, it seemed like an interesting use of the Wii. I had seen someone playing it at work and wanted to try it out.

I was excited to play this cooking game to see how a Wiimote could be used to "cook." I began the practice exercises. Some of them felt intuitive, like moving the Wiimote down to cut vegetables. Others were a bit odd, like pulling the trigger to get out chopsticks for stir-frying or shaking the Wiimote to open a can.

One of the most frustrating things about cooking with a Wiimote is the variety of actions required in such a short time. Things like cracking an egg are very pressure sensitive and can be incredibly hard at first. Then, 30 seconds later, you do another task that requires a new move that you just learned. It felt a lot like learning a dance when tired – you know the motions but you can't quite remember how they all fit together.

I was hoping I'd enjoy the idea of having a "mama" to grade my progress. When I was young, my mother taught me everything I knew in the kitchen, and she was very supportive and loving. In Cooking Mama, the mother would make comments as you attempted to complete the tasks. I didn't mind the heavily-accented "Good" or "Excellent," but all the
comments weren't quite as positive. For example, every time I failed to crack an egg, I heard a message in seemingly Japanese-English gibberish. After about 10 times, I finally figured out that this Japanese mother was saying "You're not mine" – she was disowning me. Well, Cooking Mama, you're not mine either.

Maybe my ego is just too easily bruised, but I really enjoy games that have a nice learning curve. In a friendly game like Cooking Mama, shouldn't there be more nurturing and less tough love? I really enjoy cooking in real life, and I believe a lot of that is because many of the manual tasks can be relaxing. It's sad that it didn't translate into this game, which turned into a stressful short-term memory test.