Hands on with mobile Cooking Mama

If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. And cook on your phone.

Sandwiched between sessions of serious work, we took a break during last week's CTIA show to enter the mobile kitchen of Cooking Mama. Translating the immensely popular Nintendo DS version, the game largely keeps the experience intact for its mobile outing.

Cooking Mama, then, puts you under the tutelage of one Mama, maestro of the kitchen and fiery-eyed diva of dining. Two modes – Cooking and Practice – enable you to create dishes from recipes handed down from Mama. As you complete these with skill, new ones are unlocked for you to try.

The cooking itself involves a series of simple steps that tie button presses with contextual actions such as cracking eggs, chopping vegetables, or stirring ingredients.

We whipped up a Japanese egg roll, which is a recipe brought over from the DS game. The recipe consists of four easy steps, the first of which is breaking three eggs into a bowl. A coloured meter at the bottom of the screen signifies how fast you break the shell with a tap of the center key stopping the gauge. The goal is to stop the meter as it passes through a green band. Do this and you'll break the eggs perfectly.

With the yolks swimming in a slimy sea of whites, the next step requires stirring for consistency. On DS, this was done using the stylus to blend yolks and whites together but it's obviously a little trickier on mobile. So, getting the eggs to mix is done by presses of the D-pad in a clockwise fashion. It's fairly difficult to get a smooth mix since you're pressing buttons instead of using a stylus or even an analogue control stick.

Still, once the eggs have been mixed, the recipe calls for additional ingredients to be introduced. Soy sauce, sweet sake, and sugar appear in small spice bowls on the screen around the mixing bowl. The game flashes numerals above each bowl and then takes them away, prompting you to hit the numbers on your pad in the correct order.

The final step in making our Japanese egg roll brings us to the stove. Pour the egg mixture into a square pan over a pre-heated burner and it begins to cook. Timed taps down on the D-pad rolls the cooked sheet of eggs bit by bit. After about four taps, the eggs are completely rolled up and ready to serve.

Our eggy concoction is but one of the recipes to be featured in Cooking Mama. SquareEnix hasn't committed to a specific number of recipes for its mobile cookbook, although senior producer Keiji Fujita assures us that th team's attempting to include as many as possible. "Much of the concern," Fujita explains, "is in catering to the configurations of so many devices here in America."

The game has already been released in Japan (as you'll see from the screenshots), however, getting the same game to work on less powerful massmarket devices is a challenge. Limitations on the amount of space may restrict how many recipes will be available when the game is served up.

The only potential drawbacks to this cute and quirky title are its challenging controls and limited cookbook. While there's a chance Cooking Mama will cram a tonne of recipes in, it's unlikely. But on current form, what will eventually end up on the menu early next year should be good fun nonetheless.