Preview: Personal Trainer: Cooking Gives DS Owners a Taste For Non-Gaming

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Preview: Personal Trainer: Cooking Gives DS Owners a Taste For Non-Gaming

Tue, Oct 7, 2008

Personal Trainer: Cooking is not a game. There are no points to earn, no objectives to fulfill and no virtual customers to serve. It has absolutely nothing to do with Cooking Mama. No, Personal Trainer: Cooking is a interactive cookbook -- a piece of computer software -- that just happens to be perfectly suited to the Nintendo DS.

At the 2008 Nintendo Media Summit, we made careful note of exactly how it might help us bribe our significant others.

Released in Japan as Cooking Navi in 2006 and in Europe and Australia earlier this year as Cooking Guide: Can't Decide What to Eat? , Personal Trainer (hereafter PTC) is basically a 245+ recipe cookbook with a fairly diverse selection of dishes from all around the world. But rather than simply list steps and ingredients like a collection of dumb recipe cards, PTC contains a smart hyperlink toolkit of sorts that helps you through the entire process.

The first thing we noticed when booting up the program is just how easy PTC makes it to pick a recipe. Sure, you can sort through the entire catalog, but if you have a taste for something in particular, you can search for it. Got some pasta lying around? Search by ingredient. Fancy some Japanese? Search by country. Want something spicy? Search using "spicy" as a keyword.

Perhaps even more useful is the software's ability to filter out recipes you don't want. You can filter by difficulty, by cooking time (there are a number of simple dishes that take less than 10 minutes) and even by calorie count. Vegetarians, picky eaters and those with allergies can also choose to flag or entirely remove recipes that contain unwanted ingredients. (I eat neither beef nor pork, so I spent about a minute crossing off hamburger, sausage, etc.)

After we found our first recipe and chuckled over its country of origin (at right), we ran across the game's second smart tool: an integrated shopping list. While a minor trifle, the ability to check off ingredients you need on the 'recipe card' and automatically generate a list is most welcome -- especially in combination with the software's serving size calculator. If you need to make a double, triple or even a half-size recipe, one touch converts all the ingredient amounts accordingly. For potentially hard to find foreign ingredients, the program also has a substitute list. For instance, in place of the Japanese seasoning shichimi togarashi, the game recommended cayenne.

Once you bring home the bacon -- or pancetta, depending -- PTC holds your hand through the entire recipe. Instructions will be displayed in text and read aloud; individual concepts such as cooking rice will have hyperlinks to more detailed instructions and even videos explaining basic cooking processes; and full pictures are provided for each step.

Though we weren't able to test it out in the crowded room, the system also apparently has voice command abilities so you don't need to actually touch the DS to tell your instructor to repeat, move forward or backwards a step. We did note that you can change the speaking speed of the narrator.

Once you've finished a recipe, you can stamp it on your calendar for future reference a la Brain Age or Wii Fit, and add notes and suggestions for next time via a fairly responsive handwriting recognition system.

While it's hard to say how long the software's approximately 245 recipes will last -- a version that allowed users to enter their own, assisted by the DSi's new camera, and swap recipes online via Wi-Fi would be to die for, hint hint wink wink-- those that are included look pretty tasty, and the process of creation guided enough that budding chefs might do well to apply.

Since my personal culinary talents are limited to sandwiches and cereal, you will certainly find me in line for Personal Trainer: Cooking this November 24th.

To see the software in action, we recommend having a look at the official European website, right here.

Oh, and before we forget, PTC does include one game after all.