Starting with Wii Sports, the platform has exploded in popularity bringing to life sports play that even your parents can instantly enjoy even without reading the manual.

Cooking Mama does the same by bringing to life the cooking experience from start to finish that’s fun even if you’re not already a master chef.

I’m certainly no master chef in real life, but I play one on TV.

This game teaches and simulates the work involved in cooking with its rewarding outcome of well cooked meals once you’ve followed all of the steps in a recipe.

Cooking doesn’t seem hard while playing the game. It’s all about timing and following the correct sequences in order. Working with a myriad of recipes of different origins, the game takes you into Mama’s kitchen where you start learning how to prepare domestic and foreign dishes in the comfort of sitting in front of the television.

Prior cooking experience is not required and not knowing how to cook can actually be a treat by observing how a particular meal is made piece by piece. You get to do it yourself where it is clean fun that doesn’t require any clean up. Upon each section, Mama gives you a little briefing describing how the preparation of the dish works at every step of the way. Once you start, the sections that are broken down are executed by your cooking.

The cooking sequences range in difficulty from simple preparation of basic ingredients to the more complex combination of all of the ingredients to stir fry. Not surprisingly, many dishes share the same cooking process in common with dishes in the beginning but later fork off to develop into the different dish of differing origin. Peeling vegetables and slicing ingredients are examples of common techniques learned that are repeated throughout cooking different dishes. Barbequing kebabs or frying tofu are examples of what sets apart each dish with some of the key ingredients requiring a different style of attention. All dishes universally require key timing of execution in order to prevent undercooking or overcooking.

The realistic visual effects of some of the ingredients make the game simulate a sense of authenticity than what I had originally expected from a video game. My confidence of cooking has skyrocketed with some of the ambiguity stripped away by doing the Wiimote approximation of how it’s done in real life. From cutting beef, to separating squid, some of the ingredients actually look slimy or oily. The texture looks real throughout the entire cooking process.

The learning curve for learning the Wiimote for Cooking Mama is relatively intuitive compared to most other Wii games. They really took advantage of using the Wii’s unique Wiimote interface to combine moves that can’t be easily replicated using other interfaces. Using the Wiimote, some of the preparation sections are indeed difficult to figure out on the first try. However, once you walk through that sequence once or twice, you’ll be able to pick up on the process relatively quickly and soon master how to do that particular sequence. Most of the other sequences are self intuitive by correlating how it work work in real life. Often times, you realize how a dish unfolds in front of you in the matter of a couple of minutes.

What I like about this game is its complexity of dishes that are broken down to simple execution phases. With the simplicity of the game play integrated, the real notable metric of performance is the timing and the speed in working within Mama’s kitchen. Speed and timing also brings competitive cooking battles between the computer or another play on the second Wiimote. In order to compete with the best times, the game encourages a practice mode where you can run through the exercise of preparing individual dishes to hone in on particular skills.

The game is also really cute. Nobody gets hurt and the worst thing that can happen in the game is making the kitchen messy. It is an encouraging game where Mama will give her kinds words whether you’re doing well, or even when you’re not doing so well where Mama tells you to “Try harder. I’ll do it for you…” The end result always results in a full cooked meal that looks good enough to eat.

The main features of the game are its visual effects and it’s newly added interface using the Nintendo Wiimote complimented with the Wii nunchuck attachment. Visually, the game brings out the hand drawn 2 dimensional anime characters and displays the 3D form of the characters using techniques techniques such as cell shading to each game character to put them each of them into a lifelike 3 dimensional element. It has a feeling of bringing comic book characters to life and you get to control how they fight. This allows for the game to be played across a wide area 3D plane for massive levels to explore and destroy in the interim of hunting and pummeling the opponent.

Blending the Wiimote interface with this 3D fighter game attributes to this 3D experience into a game previously ported from the Playstation 2 platform. This updated Wii version is essentially the same game as the PS2 version with all of the extra features typical of arcade style fighter games, however, the Wii version encourages the user to use the new Wii style controller to command complex strings of attacks against the opponent instead of pure button pressing with “standard” gaming controllers.

The Wiimote nunchuck attachment is required to work with the wireless Wiimote however the game also supports using a Gamecube controller through the Wii’s 4 port axillary GameCube controller ports on its side. The Wiimote commands an alternative interface allowing the player to translate their physical motions of how the characters would move in person through the Wiimote controller. Without reading the owner’s manual, from my testing, I would use the nunchuck to move the character forward, back, left, and right while flailing my other arm with the other controller hitting the A and/or B buttons to see what the response would be. It didn’t take long to realize that the game was a little bit more complex than mere button mashing, ahem, “Wiimote flailing”.

To make the character fly vertically in the air to either chase the enemy or to evade the enemy, hold the “c” button and then move the Wiimote in the air up or down to ascend or descend. Since the scenery is so big, there is a feature to fly forward to your enemy by holding (flying technique). An awkward function to flying is learning how to stop in which I still haven’t completely figured out yet. The problem is that the character flies endlessly into a circle and eventually drains all of the character’s rechargeable Ki power meter bar in order to stop. I avoid that move for now.

Fans of the anime would know of the super power moves that each character possesses in their various Super Saiyan forms. An interestingly attractive feature is the initiation of the Kamehameha wave produced by holding the “z” + “b” button key sequence and drawing the controllers to your side and then pushing forward. Picture how Ken and Ryu’s “hadouken” fireball. This looks really cool when showing off to friends and is quite a visually appealing sequence because it feels just like how the anime character would throw a fireball. The scenery of the levels is also interactive and craters can form from the large exothermic reaction caused by the explosion. The aftermath of a few of the Ki based super attacks yields destroyed terrain in the scenery.

There is a bit of a learning curve without playing any of the older 3D Dragon Ball Z games in the series and a little more so learning how to use the Wiimote. The game consists of battling it out against your opponent in a massive 3D world. It is this depth of size that makes new players trying to find the opponent difficult if either you or the enemy has flown away. You have to learn how to navigate in free 3D plane and to utilize the navigation map which displays the enemy’s relative position. On top of that, the game controls are not immediately intuitive. However, once you get used to the battle system and learn how to navigate around the battle ground, the game brings out the fun factor of using the new Wiimote interface.

There are a few things that should be considered when using an external USB hard drive of this portability class. Since the hard drive used in the Maxtor OneTouch III, Mini Edition is a 2.5″ 5400 RPM laptop drive, this eliminates the requirement of using a separate power adapter to power up the drive. The power is driven entirely by USB. Typical, bulkier external hard drives require an AC adapter that makes it difficult when moving the device around. Not having to lug around a power adapter can make the difference when space and weight is at a premium for the laptop road warrior.

Another consideration is the speed of the disk and its associated USB interface speed. Pretty much all external USB drives sold today will support USB 2.0 transfers speeds ideal for high throughput I/O transfers such as DVD burning.

So what is the trade off for the power requirement in using the smaller 2.5″ drive in the Maxtor OneTouch III? To compensate for not using an additional power adapter, Maxtor’s design uses a specialized USB cable that is capable of supplying the standard USB connection in addition to an additional USB connection used exclusively as a power source. The cable has two standard USB plugs that plug directly into the computer and one standard mini USB connection that plugs directly into the external hard drive.

From initial testing, most standard PC’s do not need the secondary auxiliary USB connection.

For Macs, the hard drive worked out of the box for our G4 iBook and Intel MacBook. A simple format using Disk Utilities would make the drive Mac OS formatted, however, this is unnecessary and will restrict the device accessible natively only by Macs. Keeping the FAT32 file system included on the drive ensures compatibility between Macs and PC’s. Unfortunately, for the newer Intel MacBook Pros and the G4 15″ PowerBooks, the USB Y-Cable is separated on two opposite sides and can not be simultaneously connected. One trick that worked was only plugging in one of the two USB connections into the MacBook or iBook and thus one USB connection is sufficient. However, on the bigger 15″ G4 PowerBook and Intel MacBook Pro, when only plugged into one USB port (due to physical layout on opposite sides), the hard drive would emit a high pitched frequency and would not be recognized by the system.

Thus, the Maxtor drive is incompatible with the 15″ laptop offerings from Apple. On both IBM ThinkPads and Dell Lattitudes, this drive worked perfectly in Windows XP.

The drive is compact and is very light for traveling purposes, but it only offers a conservative amount of protection of the outer shell in lieu of extra bulk. This works out relatively well as the drive looks stylish in its gray color with only one cable connected to its back. One feature was the Hard Disk activity LED indicator which would flash as the drive is being connected and accessed. The White LED is a little big and not very discreet, making it somewhat distracting as the user may shift his or her eyes seeing the white light. The case also lacks a significant amount rubber padding on the base. It would have been nice to see some sort of rubber padding to help absorb the shock of the hard drive while it is spinning on the desk.

Overall, the hard drive was easy to use and transferred files really quickly. Despite incompatibility with a particular branch of Apple Laptops, it largely worked out of the box.

The Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is light weight and easy to carry around making this ideal for clearing the immediate error message of lacking disk space.