In my day-to-day life, I don't cook. My husband does a majority of the cooking in our household. This is mostly due to the fact that I hate to cook. For some reason, I decided to load up Hot Dish to see if I'd like that any more than real life cooking. I both liked and hated this game. On one hand, the simulated cooking is a lot like Cooking Mama on both the Nintendo DS and Wii. You choose a dish and you go through the steps to cook it. From chopping the vegetables to simmering the seafood to baking the bread, you do it all. However, Hot Dish throws you for a loop by forcing you to prepare more than one dish at a time. It starts out with one dish in the tutorial but you are quickly thrown into making three dishes at once! This means you have to keep track of when to flip your grilled chicken over so it does burn while stirring your warming milk so it doesn't curdle while flipping your sauteed shrimp. It really does get to be too much.

In my opinion, this game would have been better if it had focused on making two dishes at once instead of three. As it is, you already make an appetizer, a main course and a dessert. Do you really need to make three of each at once? The game only shows one reviewer and I doubt that she is eating that much food by herself. I think I'll stick with Cooking Mama. At least she doesn't try to drive me to drink!