Personal Trainer: Cooking
© 2008 Nintendo of America
This innovative addition to Nintendo's Personal Trainer series turns your Nintendo DS into a talking cookbook with voice recognition. So, it can listen for your voice before jumping to the next step in the recipe in case your hands are full of Tiramisu. An onboard chef acts as your cooking instructor who talks you through 245 select recipes from around the world. Features include the ability to search the database by ingredients, calorie count, cooking time, country of origin, and difficulty. For example, selecting ‘less than 20 minutes’, ‘less than 500 calories’, and ‘seafood’, results in nine recipes. Once you zero in on your recipe, you can check off the ingredients that you need to buy and then take your Nintendo DS to the store with you to serve as a shopping list. Additional content includes videos of cooking techniques, explanations of ingredients, and advice. When you finish a recipe, you can put a stamp on the in-game calendar, marking what you made, and when you made it -- making it easier to return to a recipe you like. Our testers found a variety of recipes, including clam chowder, mussels in white wine and octopus salad from Italy. We counted 43 steps in the Swedish Meatballs, with no shortcuts. The instructions are thorough enough so that that even people with no cooking experience beyond Pop-Tarts can make something, provided they follow the instructions. The most trouble is likely to occur at the supermarket when you try to find exotic ingredients. The voice-recognition worked as advertised and allows you to concentrate on your cooking without getting your DS greasy. However, if cooking in a noisy environment, the recipe may progress unprompted. This is a beautiful example of the practical functionality of the Nintendo DS.
$20, Nintendo DS
Teaches: cooking, reading, following directions
CTR Rating: 90%