Cooking Mama
Cooking Mama is a series of cookery-themed arcade mini-games where you have to prepare a meal by doing various tasks, based on the console game of the same name.
How To Get It:
You can download Cooking Mama from Ovi Store by selecting your phone's Ovi Store icon, or by going to store.ovi.mobi on your phone's web browser.
Alternatively you can go to store.ovi.com on your computer's browser.
If you can't see the game displayed on Ovi Store, it probably isn't compatible with your phone model.
For more info about using Ovi Store, see our Unofficial Ovi Store FAQ page.
Ovi Gaming Review:
Phone Used For Review - Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (game may look different on different phone models)
Gameplay - Cooking Mama is a mobile game based on the popular cookery-themed console games. It's made up of a collection of very simple mini-games where you perform some part of a recipe, and making a dish consists of several minigames in a row as the ingredients are prepared and cooked. The tasks are usually gesture-based and use the 5800's touchscreen, for example stirring a bowl of ingredients by making circles on the screen, or kneading dough by moving your finger or stylus back and forth in a particular direction. Some minigames involve various different tasks (stir the soup, turn the cooker heat up etc) appearing on a conveyor belt in the order you have to do them, very much in the style of notes in a music game.
Graphics & Sound - The graphics in Cooking Mama are nice simple Japanese-style cartoons with a sprinkling of photos thrown into the mixture. It's not technically impressive, but it is very pretty and looks like something from the Nintendo DS. Sound consists of several nice quiet tunes playing in the background, which change depending on whether you're actually cooking or just browsing an options menu. Unfortunately there are no sound effects, so you won't hear any brilliantly annoying "Wonderful! Better than mama!" samples.
Multiplayer & Online - None.
TV Out - As it's a 2D game with cartoon graphics Cooking Mama looks brilliant on a television, but if you're playing it on a touchscreen phone you will be too busy looking at the phone's screen to care about how it looks on a TV. However, the TV Out could be useful if other people want to watch you playing the game.
Overall - Cooking Mama looks and sounds pretty nice, it makes good use of the 5800's touchscreen, and it even lets you switch between horizontal and vertical modes without reloading the game. However, the gameplay is far too limited. There are only three recipes on offer which consist of about eight mini-games, none of which are particularly difficult, and you'll probably finish the game within the first 15 - 30 minutes of playing it with virtually no replay value as the game doesn't even record your best times. To make matters worse, one of the tasks ("Panfrying") seems to be totally broken due to an input bug and is apparently impossible to complete. If the developers could fix the frying bug, add lots more recipes (20+) and put in some reason to re-play levels (such as a best time feature), then this game might be worth buying, but as things stand this isn't much more than a very pretty demo.
Ovi Gaming Score - 40%
Ovi Gaming Video (shows game on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, game may look different on different phone models):
