Cooking Mama [DS]

Chop. Peel. Stir. Mix. Fry. Not words that occur often in game reviews. Cooking Mama isn't your ordinary game, though: it's a collection of bite-sized minigames disguised as a cooking tutorial. Rather than zapping enemies and collecting coins, you'll be chopping vegetables, simmering stocks, and deep-frying chicken -- all to your teacher Mama's exacting standards. It's completely disposable, and will leave those with an appetite for more meaty gaming unsatisfied, but it's a real delight in small servings.

Mama's minigames use the touchscreen almost exclusively. Peeling vegetables involves dragging the stylus to remove a strip of skin; combining ingredients in a saucepan requires you to drag-and-drop the right item into the pan at the right time, while keeping the heat under control. Most games last just a few seconds and take place under strict time limits. It strings a few of them together like steps in a recipe, and awards a prize at the end based on the quality of your finished dish (read: your accuracy and speed in the minigames).

Cutting edge might be an appropriate term for some of the tools in Cooking Mama, but it's not applicable to the presentation. Still, its cartoony, lovable visuals are just as much of a feast as the food looks to be. The music, like the rest of the game, is repetitive but suits its purpose very well. Best of all, the game's sound effects -- key to such a control-focused game as Cooking Mama -- are perfect, capturing the thunk of knives and the gentle boiling of soup with just the right blend of secret herbs and spices... sorry, character and realism.

That, in a nutshell, is all Cooking Mama has to offer. You'll unlock a large number of recipes as you play, and there are quite a number of these minigames to master. As one for the kids, a way to kill a few minutes in between classes, or as a gateway game for those less enthralled by the DS's more traditional catalog, it's sure to acquire its share of fans.

So while there isn't all that much on the menu, the fast-paced and simple gameplay can't fail to raise a smile, at least for the first few plays. Most will set it aside after that, but it's priced at a decidedly value-conscious $20 -- less than the cost of a good steak. It's still a little limited at that price, but it's hard to be too mad at Mama. Few games are as well suited to the DS as this one is, and fewer still tackle such quirky subject matter with this amount of success. But it's the gaming equivalent of a restaurant where all they serve is onion soup; onion soup is great, but we won't be coming back very often.