You cook, I cook, Wii cook
Several months ago, I wrote about the MagiCook Kitchen by Little Tikes, which won't help anyone actually create any meals, but will help to inspire a love for cooking in kids before they're old enough to start dealing with actual culinary hardware. The PlayStation and Xbox generation of kids, however, can be a bit harder to please in the toy department, and may require more high tech coaxing into loving the kitchen.
With games like Cooking Mama for the Nintendo Wii, game developers are trying to do just that. The game allows you to create food from recipes by mimicking the motions used in the kitchen. You can mime chopping vegetables and stirring soup with the Wii remote, and your actions are translated onto the screen. What's missing from gameplay, however, are the actual tools of the trade. Last time I checked, Wii remotes weren't available in the "chef's tool's" aisle of my local grocery store.
But now, you can get the next best thing: a set of kitchen tools that actually fit onto the remote! The kit comes with four attachments that you use to fry, spear, cut, and scrape your way to video game culinary success. You can mimic cutting vegetables on a board without having to imagine where the knife tip sits, flip pancakes like a pro, saute, and pierce your foods in the game. It's more realistic than playing the game without the tools, so when it's time to enter a real kitchen, the transition is a bit more seamless.
So maybe it doesn't hold a candle to the real deal, but it could do wonders for guys looking for an excuse to play more video games: "But honey, I'm learning how to cook!"
