While in NYC last week I was very tempted to purchase the import version of Cooking Mama, the innovative DS title that's making its way to the States courtesy of Majesco, but two things stopped me; its ridiculous $54.99 price tag and the language barrier, since the game is entirely in Japanese. I'm sure that I could find my way around the menus and commands, but there's just something about "under $40" and "English" that's really attractive, so I left Cooking Mama in the Big Apple and it's been eating at me ever since. This is a game that may help define the DS as a unique product, further cementing its budding legacy as a portable machine for the ages, and I want it ASAP.

Cooking Mama is just as special as Trauma Center: Under the Knife because its developers have taken a simple idea and done an excellent job transferring it to the DS. Whereas Trauma Center is centered on operating with the stylus, Mama is all about cooking with it. It's a cooking sim in which you must successfully create 76 real world dishes by adding the necessary ingredients and cooking them to perfection, and there's a lot more to it than just selecting foods, dragging them to the center of the screen and dropping them into the pan. Before cooking anything you may have to slice butter and then smooth it around the frying pan so that the foods don't stick, and if your delightful treats are too hot then you'll need to cool them down by blowing into the DS' microphone. Furthermore, you'll use the stylus to chop, mash, knead, slice, mix, peel, tenderize, and fry, so one minute you'll be furiously chopping onions and the next you'll be kneading dough.

You'll begin the game with 15 recipes, but you can unlock an additional 61, all of which appear to be quite varied, so there's a wide host of different things to do, and if anything, the game will definitely keep you on your toes. Master the art of cooking and you'll be rewarded with gold, silver, and bronze medals, but you can't get too cocky because it's quite easy to ruin a dish. However, there is a practice mode that allows you to perfect your culinary skills.

Having not played the import (I toyed with the U.S. version a couple months ago), I'm confused about a few of the game's features beginning with the mini games. The press release says that there are 200, but I'm pretty sure that that's straight PR speak. In other words, Majesco probably counts cutting butter as one mini game. I'd certainly like to believe that Taito has somehow crammed 200 mini games onto a DS cart, but I have some serious doubts. Furthermore, I'm not sure whether you can actually access "cooking butter" as a separate option.

I'm also confused about Cooking Mama's wireless functionality. You can supposedly share recipes with up to four other people, but what the hell does that mean, exactly? And why would someone want the recipe for cabbage meat rolls? What purpose does that really serve, other than to actually use the DS as a cookbook, or is that the point? Finally, the press release says that recipes can be combined to create advanced dishes, but again, I'm wondering what the benefits are.

All mysteries aside, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Cooking Mama, even if all I was doing was frantically cutting and mashing things and mixing them together. The touch screen recognition is spot on, and the game is just a refreshing change of pace from the boring map screens and tired platform mechanics of other DS titles. It's originality like this that I would like to see a lot more of, but for now, I'm content to enjoy Cooking Mama as soon as it's released, which should be sometime this summer or early fall. I'm anticipating a Majesco summer event in the near future, so you can expect more in-depth impressions in the coming months.