Get your cooking on at Nintendo World

If you're going to be in New York City this Saturday, you might want to swing by the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Center. Majesco will be holding the Cooking Mama: Cook Off Challenge at Nintendo World on March 31 from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Like most P.R. events, this promises to have free food, prizes, and other cool reasons for Nintendo fanboys, bored gamers, and shameless mooches to attend.

The event will have an on-site chef (read: caterers with hats) offering snacks to hungry gamers while they play Cooking Mama: Cook Off on the store's Wii kiosks. Besides eating and playing, gamers can also compete in Cooking Mama: Cook Off contests for prizes, including copies of the game and "limited edition, collectible aprons." Aprons are sort of a strange prize, but they certainly fit in with the game's theme better than a t-shirt or a keychain.

Cooking Mama: Cook Off wasn't too well received by GameSpot, which gave the game a 5.5 rating. I played the game last week and had about the same reaction. The game is very cute, but its minigames range from shallowly clever to irritatingly incomprehensible, and it simply lacks the polish of minigame compilations like WarioWare: Smooth Moves and Rayman Raving Rabbids. On the other hand, Mama herself is simply an adorable character, even if those crazy star-eyes freak me out a bit.