Like seriously, how is it possible that leading iPhone blogs like TouchArcade or even TiPB are not covering this?

The first time I came across Cooking Mama was back in college when one of my classmates was busy cooking on her Nintendo DS at the back of a classroom. I thought it was the coolest game I had ever played since The Sims.

Here’s this thing about me. I hate cooking. But I have always loved play cooking since I was a kid. While girls would usually go gaga over Barbies and My Little Pony, I went for McDonald’s hamburger sets or food editions Play Doh. And yes, since I am an only child, I had an imaginary friend at one point. But it was more like an imaginary customer who I cooked dirt and dead grass for on my plastic kitchen stove. Even when I was addicted to The Sims, my most favorite part was not the interaction or the house design, but the restaurant and the cooking skill practice.

Anyway back to Cooking Mama. After finding out my own cousin, who’s a boy, had the game on his rather macho DS, I was ecstatic. I borrowed it for a week and managed to get gold medals for all menus despite the game at the time having all instructions in Japanese.

I almost bought a Wii when I found out they have cooking utensil consoles.

I had been waiting for this game on the iPhone ever since I got one. I knew it would come even though it was an obvious Nintendo-only game. I was so psyched I was willing to pay US$7 for a game.

You may think that’s cheap but most great fun iPhone games usually hover around US$2-5. So I cheated a little and kind of… um… borrowed a sneakily obtained version first just to try it out to see if it would be worth my 7 dollars. Hey I did that with Flick Fishing, Photogene and Tweetie OK and I am now a fully legit and paid user of these apps.

I installed the game about midnight last night and finished all menus, with gold medals, by 3am.

I am very disappointed. On DS, the menu is vast, and the steps are much more difficult. There are a lot of things that the iPhone version doesn’t have like rice cooking, breaded tonkatsu, makis, takoyaki, etc. basically the stuff that made me fall in love with Cooking Mama in the first place. On the iPhone version everything is so easy. It’s all about cutting and mixing. Like for example, a dish like katsu curry rice on DS you would get to cook the rice, bread the pork, deep fry it etc. On iPhone, you just make the curry. What is up with that?

OK this rant is probably only useful for a handful of people but I really need to contribute to the interwebs about this game. So far Google mainly shows blogs and websites introducing and announcing the game with no reviews. Well here’s one.

So I am kinda glad that I didn’t spend my hard earned 7 dollars. But I definitely will when they come out with an update that offers more menus. For now, I’m already bored and deleting it.