Ready Steady Cook

System: Wii
Developer: Mindscape
Publisher: Mindscape
Genre: Cooking
Players: 1-2

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Ready Steady Cook! Today on the show we’ll be concocting some very creative dishes all involving a good dose of waggle, wiggle and shake regularly dispersed with a dollop of shake, waggle and maybe a bit more waggle just to vary things. If any of today’s participants have arm or shoulder injuries, be prepared to double over in pain as you repeat consistent repetitive motions that would surely be banned by which ever governmental body regulates OH&S standards in Australia!

*Crowd roars with excitement!* READY! STEADY! COOK! *Crowd continues to roar with excitement!*

Ready Steady Cook for the Wii is essentially, nothing like the TV show. Who would have guessed it?! Even the game box touts this as being “The official game for the hit TV series on TEN”. I can only guess they mean channel 10 in the UK, as the opening video is not from the Australian show, but the British one. (Mindscape you old scoundrel, thought you could get that one by us ha!) Mindscape are in the business of brining many TV shows over to the console and their track record so far hasn’t been that great.

But have they thrown away a real opportunity to make something more with Ready Steady Cook?

For those of you who don’t know, Ready Steady Cook is a cooking game show broadcast on the Channel TEN network in Australia. It’s been mildly popular with day time audiences and it’s format is light and fun. Two contestants from the crowd assisted by two renowned Aussie chefs work together to come up with a couple of dishes. They fight it out in a Green and Red kitchen, while the host consistently annoys each team by talking to them, fiddling with food and generally being a pain. Then the crowd votes on who created the best dishes.


The thing that makes cooking shows like this worth watching is that balancing act between getting all the food prepared, vegetables chopped, meat simmering away, potatoes baking in the oven and sauces mixed in the blender. Then all arranged tastefully and presented on a plate within a tight time frame - in the TV version 20 minutes. Ready Steady Cook for Wii really misses the mark on well, most of what makes the show worthwhile.
 
For a start, there is no sense of drama or urgency!

Every kitchen has it's dramas, it's upsets, it's rollercoaster of emotions. You're busily baking a cake and mum rings. While skillfully whisking the flour and butter you lean over with your left hand and pick up the phone, cradling it between your ear and shoulder. Damn, you just knocked the spachelor onto the floor, bending over to pick it up your elbow catches a cord. Suddenly a searing hot kettle of water comes cascading over the side of the counter severely scalding your neck and sending you reeling in torturous pain. Recoiling in horror, you trip backwards on the soaking tiles, spin around and loose your footing, impaling yourself on the cake server you had in your other hand, piercing your heart and causing you to shudder and spasm as your last gasps and bloody wheezes are caught by your distraught mother on the other end of the phone as she screams in anguish at the hopelessness of the situation. Ending your life in a flurry of culinary romance, doing what you love, dying like a true chef should die. It's what makes cooking so enjoyable!


Ready Steady Cook misses this because you don’t get the feeling that you are making a complete meal. Every step in the cooking process is a separate mini-game, with it’s own timer. And you only end up focusing on one ingredient at a time. A much better design in my opinion would be to have a whole kitchen bench of things in front of you, and let the player decide how they will attack the cooking. Will you make the sauce first, followed up by chopping the vegetables. Put the seasoning on the meat and into the oven then work on the accompanying salad. Ready Steady Cook is all very structured without any room for your own influence. But isn’t your own personal touch what cooking is all about? Grandmas is always the best, because it's grandmas!

How many moving red lines are in your kitchen?

Cooking isn’t about filling up bars and gauges, it’s about experience and intuition. Hmm, that chicken tastes like salmonella again, better put it back in the pan. How are the potatoes browning, is the sauce simmering. Instead Ready steady goes with the good old fashioned and traditional - Wave Wiimote until red bar fills up. Tilt Wiimote and keep the moving line out of the red zone. It's disconnected. You've got a controller that can be a spoon, knife, whisk or anything you like - why not use it that way? There is the odd game that gets closer, like chopping up a carrot for instance, by taking chopping motions (Incredible ha?). Peeling it though involves an animation of a peeler moving up and down, making you swipe the remote at just the right time to see if you even connect the peeler with the carrot to take some skin off. It's an interesting (retarded) idea, although I prefer - hold carrot and peel. Call me crazy, call me weird, or even call me a psychopathic suicidal murderer, but just don't try the moving vegetable peeler treatment with me.
 

Where’s the fun factor?

Porting TV game shows to consoles is hard at the best of times. It’s difficult to portray the atmosphere of the crowd, the flashing lights and your love/hate relationship with the show’s host. What’s the next best thing – make it stupid fun.
Iron Chef doesn't entice thousands of viewers because it's a show about cooking, there are billions of those shows. It's so great because it's stupidly melodramatic. Voiceovers for all of the chefs that attempt to add the inflections and gasps of what they are saying. This combined with the Japanese craziness for making a show where the presenter walks in with a glittering robe that he whips off, camera dramatically zooming in, and announcing the commencement of Iron Chef! It's stupid fun that promotes the sort of fan fair found at football games, people pick sides and wait on the edge of their seat for the final outcome.

Ready Steady Cook goes with a menu driven approach with the same 10 second loop of music repeating itself constantly in the background. There’s no voice acting, no animations other than the crude ones in the cooking mini-games and your accompanying chef gives you rudimentary text instructions. The only voice work you hear is when the crowd bursts out in canned laughter, when you say, don’t put enough salt in the pan in time. If Mindscape had gone with making funny characters that you could hate or laugh at, at least you’d have a reason to try to defeat them.

Really though, let’s look at the target audience.

Girls (I don't mean to be sexist, but the box is pink) around the age of 8 to 12. Does Ready Steady Cook work here, well yes and no. The game is certainly easy enough, for an 8 year old no doubt, for a 12 year old though, hmm we might be pushing things. The fact that many of the recipes repeat the same mini-games, sometimes twice in a row makes for boring game play. None of them are engaging enough for anyone in their teens or I’d even go as far as saying over 10. It’s all pretty flat and uninspired with little work on making the mini-games creative or requiring thought or skill.


Score: 5.5/10 – “Try/Rent”

Conclusion
The game isn’t an abomination, but it’s also completely disengaging. You’d have fun giving it a crack if you’ve got children around the age of 8 or below, much in the same way you could with Wiisports or Wiiplay. With the note that both of those latter products are much more fun.

Review by Ryan Scougall (squeegie)