Cooking games – all the hassle of cooking, with none of the delicious benefits, right? Well, not exactly, and especially not for the audience of casual culinary dabblers who gobbled up millions of copies of Cooking Mama.

Order Up!, unlike Cooking Mama, is about more than just pancake flipping - though you will flip pancakes - combining cooking with a variety of casual restaurant management and story elements.

Above: Told ...

Nintendo's online history is damn shaky, so we're enormously relieved to see so many developers lining to support WiiWare, the company’s downloadable software system. With so many titles already in the pipes (and several confirmed for the May 12 launch date), there's every reason to believe WiiWare will turn out to be the inde-developers platform of choice - we're already eager for more time with World of Goo and Lost Winds.

The ...

The Power Pad is back! Kinda. Okay, maybe the original NES peripheral was a bit overhyped and underwhelming, but in our opinion, its biggest downfall was people not using it correctly. You, in other words. How many of us actually beat Cheetah without ending up on our knees pounding the buttons with out hands? That’s right, we all cheated. But it doesn’t matter with Active Life: Outdoor Adventure, because the pad allows you to do just that, plus it uses the pad in conjunction with the Wii Remote for certain situations... just to keep you honest. ...

You’d be forgiven for taking one look at TNA Impact and thinking, “It’s wrestling. How different could it be from any other wrestling game?” After all, it is wrestling, and it is very similar in many ways to other grappling games - specifically THQ’s long-running WWE franchises. However, after spending some time with the latest version of the game in our hands, we discovered quite a bit more difference ...

While the Wii certainly has its fair share of Anubis II and Rock 'N' Roll Adventures dross, it’s also got brilliantly innovative games coming for the price of a couple of pints; games such as Frontier Developments’ stunning-looking LostWinds. It’s possible it’ll launch along with WiiWare, although no official release date has been set. ...

Set in a world where car culture is the culture, Speed Racer is set to blaze its psychedelic, loop-the-loop, so-fast-your-eyes-water trail this summer. Based on the Wachowski brothers’ film of the same name, you get behind the wheel of each character’s signature car, competing in the World Racing League on rollercoaster-style tracks at breakneck speeds. It aims to deliver eye-popping action in a racer that’s not just about ...

Why do you think people love Jimmy Buffet? Or Led Zeppelin? Or reggae or house or the blues or any other kind of music? Because they evoke a mood; it makes them feel a certain way. However, very few games have this ability. Luckily, Samba De Amigo is one of those games, and the mood it evokes is, “Hey! Let’s have a crazy, possibly booze-fueled, dance party in the streets RIGHT NOW!”

The sombrero-wearing monkey ...

Finally, we can release the inner cheerleader in all of us (maybe we can even free the one chained to our water heater), now that Namco Bandai has officially announced We Cheer. Set to occupy your Wii and pre-pubescent daughter’s free time this fall, We Cheer enables you to pull off cheerleading moves using only the Wiimote set to 30 contemporary tracks Paramore, Hilary Duff and even classic feel good-anthems like “Walking on ...

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World isn’t a sequel. It’s not a side-story like Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, either. But what it really is, that’s hard to say, because there wasn’t much to see at last night’s Bandai Namco press event. We weren’t given a hands-on opportunity with Dawn of the New World - but we did get to see the new monster-catching gameplay feature and we've got some juicy ...

When you say "Star Wars fighting game," the first thing that pops into most gamers' minds is the dreadful Masters of Teras Kasi, a fighter from the original PlayStation days. Force Unleashed, however, hopes to make one-on-one force brawling appealing again by dropping 27 characters from across the franchise into nine different destructible environments and, best of all, let you go totally nuts with force-abusing recklessness. ...