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Personal Trainer: Cooking

by Chung-Hay Luk - October 6, 2008, 3:44 pm EDT
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Oh, I get cooking with a little help from my (frien)DS.

This fall, our friends at Nintendo will release an interactive cooking guide for DS as part of the Personal Trainer series. It transforms the DS into a handy kitchen appliance that’s a cookbook capable of logging recipes you’ve tried onto a calendar, providing cooking demos, dictating cooking directions, and understanding select voice commands.

You start by selecting a recipe from the main menu. The search options include the standard ones, such as main ingredient and cooking method, as well as more unique criteria, such as calories, recipe’s ethnic origin, and your ratings of the recipes. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find the option to search by meal type (e.g. snack, entrée, dessert). With so many search options, the results often came up with only a few recipes. It didn’t feel like the database contained over 200 recipes from around the world, but it does!

After selecting a recipe, you’re shown a list of ingredients and a list of necessary and recommended utensils. I like the checkboxes following each ingredient, which can be ticked to ensure no ingredient is forgotten. There is also the option to scale the recipe to different serving sizes, so you are spared some mental arithmetic.

When you finish gathering your ingredients and utensils, you proceed to the dictated directions. Each step is spoken aloud while the corresponding text is displayed. If that weren’t enough, each step comes with an illustration detailing the directions. To move through the steps, you can either click buttons with the stylus or use voice commands. Since it was loud at the summit, I couldn’t really hear the spoken instructions, so I appreciated the cartoon chef that mouthed the directions and gestured whenever he needed me to repeat what I said. Overall, the voice recognition did well understanding me despite the background noise.

In addition to recipes, the Personal Trainer provides you with culinary technique. Under the "Cooking A-Z" section, you can learn techniques through short videos. The novice cook can master the art of whisking, while the gourmet gamer can tackle the art of filleting flatfish. The Personal Trainer has something for every cook. All that’s desired is a little help from your friends to feast on your creations when Personal Trainer: Cooking hits stores on November 24.

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Cooking Guide: Can't Decide What To Eat? Box Art

Genre Simulation
Developer
Players1

Worldwide Releases

na: Personal Trainer: Cooking
Release Nov 24, 2008
PublisherNintendo
RatingEveryone
jpn: Shaberu! DS Oryouri Navi
Release Jul 20, 2006
PublisherNintendo
RatingAll Ages
eu: Cooking Guide: Can't Decide What To Eat?
Release Jun 20, 2008
PublisherNintendo
Rating3+
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