Break out your aprons and sharpen up those Wii-motes. It's time for Cooking Mama: Cook Off for the Wii.

Prepare for the attack of the food puns

   Cooking Mama is another in a long line of mini-game collections for the Wii. Yes, that's right, more ADD-inspired goodness to kill ten minutes out of your day while you're waiting for the school bus to arrive.

   In order to rate Cooking Mama, I'm going out on a limb here and using some food-related analogies. Cooking Mama is not the perfect piece of filet mignon that you've been waiting for to sate your Wii's appetite. At the same time, however, it's far from that stinky, moldy science-project you call cheese that's been in your refrigerator for the last six months. Probably the best thing to compare it to is an Applebee's steak dinner. It tastes good, but it's not the best thing you've eaten, and you're pretty sure that if you tried hard enough you could have made something better at home, and saved yourself a few bucks. That's about where Cooking Mama lands in the food spectrum.

Is something burning?

Look out, Rachael Ray!

   In case you haven't guessed by now, all those kitchen tasks are performed by moving the Wii remote in different ways. Otherwise this wouldn't be a Wii mini-game collection. Some movements include holding the remote pointed down in order to stir a soup, shaking it back and forth to keep food from burning in the skillet, and turning it like a crank to grind meat. Just don't get caught playing for too long - if you don't do your chores, your mom is likely to turn it into a rolling pin and beat you upside the head with it.

   The action is quite sensitive, too, which actually works very well. For example, when cracking eggs, if you shake the remote too hard, you'll end up with a gooey mess that goes all over the place (does that ring any bells?!), and be forced to try again until you get it right. You have to have a precise shake and then quickly hit the A button in order to master the crack technique. Probably the most fun, though, is chopping and dicing. First you slice the object, like an onion, by sliding the remote along the arrow lines indicated on screen. Then you frantically swing the remote up and down to chop away. It saves all the hassle of missing fingertips and such that you'd get if you tried that method in real life. At the end of most meals, you utilize several skills at once to heat, stir, and season the dish to perfection. Or to a black, smoking mess. It's all up to you.

This ain't your mama's Shake'n'Bake!

   All this shaking, stirring, and shimmying is broken down into individual steps to create a meal, each of which is graded for accuracy and speed. Some dishes take several steps to complete, while others are over more quickly. For instance, traditional Italian lasagna has nine parts to complete, while the first American dish you encounter, Popcorn, has exactly two steps. Two! You shake the pot on the stove to keep the popcorn from burning, and then you add salt. Tada! Break out the movie projector. The Japanese people who made the game must think Americans eat nothing but popcorn, hot dogs, and hamburgers. Who cares that for the most part that's the truth? We've come up with some great food ideas over the years. What about the fluffernutter? Or putting six kinds of meat on a pizza? (Mmm... fluffernutter pizza... whoops, sorry.)

   When you think you're good enough to master the dishes without reading the recipe/instruction page, you can retry each meal in Challenge mode, allowing you to roll straight through each step of the process without the constant breaks for your score and new instructions. This doesn't really add much depth to the process, but does allow you to further your score and unlock some more meals and test how your Wii remote motion memory skills are.

Bring a friend... or make one up!

   Unlocking meal choices not only furthers the single player mode, but gives you more options when taking the game into multiplayer goodness. If you don't have any real friends, but you still grow tired of playing through the recipes on your own, you can try the Friends and Food of the World mode, which allows you to compete against the computer in a virtual Cook Off (hence the title... duh). These contests are not that difficult, but do give a little more thrill after you've mastered some of the meals on your own. Plus, by beating the computer opponents, you can collect items for your kitchen that you can... look at. And nothing else. Yeah, it's pretty pointless. They're not even that great looking. Just silly little figurines that sit on the counter and would probably be in the way in a real kitchen. But hey, it's a prize. If you want something more real, go get yourself a gamer T-shirt.

   Now, if you're lucky enough to have some actual friends who are nerdy enough not to tell you to "cook off" at the very idea of coming over and playing games with you, the two player competitive mode is yours for the baking. Er, taking. Sorry, it just slipped out. This turns your living room into a virtual Iron Chef arena - if Iron Chef were done in pastel and had bubblegummy music in the background, and had a sometimes whiny Asian lady talking to you instead of that creepy screaming Japanese dude who eats peppers and stuff. So it's not exactly like Iron Chef. But I'm sure it would make a pretty good drinking game. If you're of age, of course. Or in college.

   Anyway, as in the main game, you're scored on accuracy and speed in the multiplayer events, and then your cumulative scores determine the winner. Sadly, since Cook Off was an early Wii title, there's no online multiplayer, so you're going to have to find, beg, or kidnap some real friends if you want the competition. The split screen action allows you to keep tabs on how your opponent is doing, or steal his or her methods if you can't figure out just what the heck you're supposed to be doing with that particular meal. Don't get too bent out of shape if people steal your skills, though: if they spend all that time watching how you do it right, odds are you're going to finish before them anyway, giving you more points and thus enabling you to kick more ass.

Put it on the back burner

   Cooking Mama: Cook Off is not quite done to perfection. It's plenty of fun in small doses, and the multiplayer does give it a bit of a kick and adds some replay value. The menu variety serves up a good mix of international foods to expand your virtual culinary knowledge, but (the inner wannabe-chef in me comes out) perhaps some access to the actual recipes would have been nice, allowing aspiring cooks to try out their new skills in the real world (with a parent's help for the young ones, of course). It looks cool just dropping bits of food into a skillet and shaking it about on the screen, but it doesn't really work too well in the kitchen, and it usually results in you making a mess and your parents making you clean the entire kitchen and wash dishes for a week and not play video games so you'll stop getting these stupid ideas and why don't you get a real job and move out of the house already and--- whoa, sorry. I think I have to go call my therapist. Maybe after I do just one more meal.

       ... Darthziggy