The original Cooking Mama game for the DS was a game that you desperately wanted to love. Unfortunately the gameplay, which condensed a variety of cooking tasks into a Wario-style minigame riot, made reasonable use of the stylus control and microphone capabilities of the DS, but provided very little in the way of challenge or incentive to return to the kitchen. There were some who adored it, mind, and presumably this is why the developers decided to produce a Wii version, much in the same way that Atlus transferred kindred spirit niche effort Trauma Centre to motion- sensor-ville.

The idea of using the Wii remote to create vegetable chopping carnage, mince meats and fry stuff is incredibly exciting. Yet sadly, after a few hours spent with the titular Mama, you would rather be getting on with some real washing up, ordering a takeaway, or rubbing wasabi into your eye sockets. The game is frustrating on a number of levels, and the control method, which should have lent so much to the gameplay, is far from palatable.

For those who are not familiar with Taito’s Cooking Mama games, they revolve around the preparation of a number of selected dishes, with each dish broken down into sections. The prep tasks are probably as realistic as you will see in a cartoon game about cooking; take the minestrone soup as an example - you will find yourself peeling the veggies, chopping them up, preparing some lardons and then transferring the results to a pan and warming them through. The DS game was very much Japan-centric, with some entrees that Western gamers would have been pretty unfamiliar with. This time around, Mama has roped in some mates from around the world, meaning that there is a bit of diversity and indeed familiarity to the meals on offer. The other obvious difference is that instead of using the DS stylus to do your chef thang, you now use the Wii Remote. Tilting it backwards and forwards in a certain way will peel, holding it sideways and jiggling it up and down will chop, and pointing at icons will change utensils or select seasoning.

This all sounds like great fun, but in practice it becomes tiresome due to the way the Wii Remote has been employed. For starters, there is absolutely zilch in the way of rumble. That may sound trivial but when you are performing some tasks - like peeling a spud – the lack of any resistance to use as a guide means that the control has a floaty and inaccurate feel to it. The responsiveness can also be extremely poor, and the fact that there is no constant presence of an on-screen pointer means that sometimes you will be waving the damn thing around like Keith Floyd after too many glasses of Noilly Prat, cursing as you fail your against-the-clock minigame.

The single player experience is uninspiring – you can either practice dishes or parts of dishes to perfect them, aim to beat your personal best on each meal with an unoriginal medal system, or “cook off” against a CPU opponent. Multiplayer is also based around this premise, but becomes drab very quickly once you realise that essentially most of the tasks on offer are extremely similar or indeed exactly the same, with only the ingredients themselves changing.

On the plus side, the title is very cheerful, with some beezer cartoon graphics that are bright, vivid and colourful. Mama is a likeable old sort; her smiling face offering gentle, Delia Smith style encouragement when you are doing well, and crimson-eyed, Gordon Ramsay fury when you mess up. And all of this with the best Engrish accent we have heard in an age. The game can also be scored for a winsome budget price, which means that it isn’t too much of a kick to the nads if you fail to get to grips with the dodgy controls and limited wares on offer.