The successful Cooking Mama game for the Nintendo DS is translated to the Wii, with less than stellar results. If you've played the DS game, you will be completely familiar with everything in Cooking Mama: Cook Off. Except the less responsive controls.
You are tasked with completing meals from your choice of country's cuisines. What follows often turns into tedium as you fight with the wiimote to smoothly respond to your actions. Lots of quick chopping and slow stirring.
Also available is a two-player cook off battle, and your chance to take on a computer controlled character to put you to shame. The computer chef will speed through some tasks, while being inexplicably slow during others, but their end result will be nothing short of perfection. Hope you can keep up.
Recommended for fans of the DS version who want the challenge of fighting the controller.
Catz is one of many "Petz" games, designed to recreate the experience of owning a real pet, without the mess and expense.
Unfortunately, Catz captures all the repetitiveness of the superior "Nintendogs," without the quality playability.
Just like in real life, your job is to keep your cat happy. Your cat has want indicator bars, showing you how tired, hungry and neglected it feels. Good luck getting it to notice the food you put out for it.
There's really not much to do in this game. You can play with your kitty for short bits. Or watch it strut around. Or take pictures of it. Or wait for a phone call to invite you to take care of someone else's cat!
The lack of rewards greatly limits the playability of this game. The money you earn for completing tasks allows you to choose from a slim assortment of accessories, or unlocks weird "cat facts" to read. It could be a better game if there was just more to it.
Recommended for cat lovers with short attention spans.
Duke Nukem Forever: The infamous game progress left behind. A decade ago, this game would probably have been a remarkable achievement. Six years ago, it might have offered some impressive points. Releasing in 2011, it is a bit of a janky mish-mashed mess.
I wasn't a fan of previous Duke Nukem games, so this title holds no nostalgic factor for me. The gunplay is rather rudimentary and unpolished. The graphics and level design are rather flat. This game just doesn't do anything very interesting, though it does try. The attempts at variety save it from just being a dismal failure, but those segments (driving, tiny platforming) overstay their welcome.
This game could never figure out what it needed to be, and ends up falling short all over the place.
Recommended for gamers with a morbid interest in seeing a fallen icon.
Marathon: Durandal looks like the original Doom, but plays more like a dungeon crawler... you're often looking around for items then backtracking to unlock further areas, all while blasting baddies.
Controls are responsive and the camera works well, but it's hard to get past the aged look.
If you didn't like it when it originally came out, you probably won't care for it.
This one is recommended only for nostalgia buffs; those curious to see the shaky history of video games and how far we've come.
Spider-Man Friend or Foe is a co-op-based superhero beat-em-up that suffers from a quick license cash-in.
Spider-Man FOF would have been a good game several years ago, but now it feels outdated and provides the player with nothing special. A game best suited for last-gen consoles.
A wide selection of characters to choose from to team up with Spider-Man, but only one is allowed at a time and many feel the exact same. Gameplay is dull and mindless.
Graphically, the stages are bland, the art direction is blocky and ugly, and the few enemies are extremely repetitive. The game runs smoothly, mostly due the fact that not much happens.
Recommended only for young children.