Product Description

Personal Trainer: Cooking brings gourmet cooking from around the globe to your Nintendo DS. It features a DS Chef, your own private cooking instructor who talks you through 245+ recipes from over 30 countries worldwide. It's a combination of interactive cookbook and live cooking demonstration that'll have you cooking like a pro, even if you've never lifted a ladle before. With so many recipes, you can find something new and tasty to make no matter what you're in the mood for. You can search a map by country to find regional dishes or select options for low-calorie foods, specific ingredients or short cooking times. Each recipe contains step-by-step directions and photos to make it possible to prepare dishes you've never tried before. Use the stylus or simple voice commands to "turn the page." Hands covered in batter? Keep your DS clean using voice commands to continue to the next page, repeat a step, go back, and more. A tap of the touch screen lets you adjust the serving size automatically, and users can write and save cooking notes, just as they would in a paper recipe book. Recipes include photos of the dish as well as instructional videos on how to perform different cooking techniques, such as how to chop an onion or clean a fish. Users can access a handy reference function to explain unfamiliar terms and cooking techniques when they appear. The software includes a timer and calculator, as well as a search function to help you find what you're looking for. Cooking Guide also includes an ingredient checklist to use as a shopping list. Just put a ? mark next to the items you need and bring your Nintendo DS to the grocery store. You and the Chef will collaborate on a wide variety of recipes, with videos of techniques, explanations of ingredients, and expert advice. With its innovative interface and the interactivity that only the DS can provide, it's a perfect learning tool for the budding chef. As you browse recip

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1249 in Video Games
• Brand: Nintendo
• Model: NTR P CNVE
• Published on: 2008-11
• Released on: 2008-11-24
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .65" h x 5.43" w x 5.75" l, .25 pounds

Features

• The stylus makes controlling Link easier than ever. Tap on the screen to make Link move, or sweep the stylus around him to swing the sword.
• Players can even draw a path for his boomerang and send it flying into hard-to-reach targets.
• Players can stash the map on the top screen for quick reference or drop it to the touch screen to make notes, study enemies, or chart a path for their boat to follow while they man the cannons.
• Compete with a friend over a local wireless connection - Guide Link through special dungeons to capture the Triforce or command the forces that oppose him.

Amazon.com

Personal Trainer: Cooking brings gourmet cooking from around the globe to your Nintendo DS. It features a DS Chef, your own private cooking instructor who talks you through 245+ recipes from more than 30 countries worldwide. It's a combination of interactive cookbook and live cooking demonstration that'll have you cooking like a pro, even if you've never lifted a ladle before.

• You and the Chef will collaborate on a wide variety of recipes, with videos of techniques, explanations of ingredients and expert advice. With its innovative interface and the interactivity that only the DS can provide, it's a perfect learning tool for the budding chef.
  
  
• As you browse recipes, just tap a box to mark ingredients you need to buy. The DS will automatically store them in your in-game shopping list. Later you can take your DS to the store and check off the ingredients as you put them in your cart.
  
  
• Search for recipes by ingredients, calorie count, cooking time, difficulty and more.
  
  
• Hands covered in batter? Keep your DS clean using voice commands to continue to the next page, repeat a step, go back and more.

About the game: The first thing to do is select a recipe. With 245+ to choose from, Personal Trainer: Cooking makes it easy to find what you're looking for by helping you browse by country, ingredients, difficulty, cooking time, cooking technique or even calorie count. Once you've found something that looks tasty, take a look at the ingredients. Out of butter or need to buy some cumin? Just tap them with the stylus to automatically add the ingredients to your Shopping List. Making several dishes tonight? Just keep tapping ingredients - your Shopping List keeps it all in one place for you. Now that you've got your ingredients, it's time to start cooking. The DS Chef is there with you, talking you through every step along the way. Don't know how to fillet a trout? Watch the demonstration video when you get to that step. Didn't quite catch the last step? Just say "Repeat," and the Chef will explain it again. You can pause the recipe at any time to consult the Cooking A-Z guide, and prompts will appear within recipes for specific terms you might need more information about.

Becoming a Better Cook: When you finish each recipe, you put a stamp on the in-game calendar, marking what you've made and when you made it. Later, you can search by whether or not you've made a dish before, allowing you to perfect your technique on a particular recipe, or keep expanding your culinary horizons. With an extensive in-game reference of cooking terms, pictures and demonstration videos, you can tailor your cooking experience to your level of skill, then watch that skill grow as you keep cooking.

Special Input Options: The game can be controlled entirely with the stylus, for maximum accessibility. When your hands are full, covered in cookie batter or otherwise unavailable, all of the in-recipe commands can be given by speaking to the DS microphone. The keyword search function uses handwriting recognition, so you can simply write out that you're looking for a "sweet" something. Finally, that same handwriting recognition is used to make notes on recipes. If you want to remember to reduce the salt, or simply that this recipe was especially tasty, the software takes the same role as the handwritten note in a cookbook.

Customer Reviews

Perfect Introduction to Cooking...from a Video Game
The Nintendo DS is an amazing piece of technology with far more potential than to just play video games (though it's certainly ideal for that). Personal Trainer: Cooking is the rare software that pushes the DS in a new direction while putting this potential to great use. You won't find high scores, cute characters or bonus levels in this game, because it's really a cookbook - a really good cookbook.

I was blown away by the quality of production for this game. It's much easier to use than I expected. By default you can select a country from a map and browse popular recipes from that area, or you can search the entire contents by main ingredient, calories or cooking time. All the menus are straightforward and both the hand writing recognition (which you can use to make notes) and voice commands work great, despite loud noises (pots and pans clanking) being picked up erroneously. The included videos are similarly high quality and very helpful if you are unfamiliar with any part of a recipe. You'll also find a glossary, conversions, sustitutions, and a handy timer.

When making one of the nearly 250 recipes included, you'll get a step-by-step walkthrough. It's easy to go through the entire recipe before you start to see what you'll be doing, but it's certaily not neccessary. The ingredients and kitchenware you'll need are listed for you when you bring up the recipe. Just lay out the DS on the counter where you can see both screens and if you need to go back and repeat instructions to any step or go ahead to the next step at any time you can do so with a voice command or using the touch screen. As mentioned, short videos are available to show you many of the required culinary skills. You can bring up the appropriate video for a step (when applicable) with voice command or touchscreen as well.

If you are a seasoned, worldly chef, you'll likely find the production values to be overkill and many recipes too basic. Yet the average home cook will likely find the perfect introduction to at least a few dozen unfamiliar dishes. For the young or inexperienced cook, this game is a cheaper and better pimer than practically any cookbook.

Fantastic for Those Less Experienced in Cooking
Personal Trainer: Cooking is a great purchase for those of us who are either relatively inexperienced in cooking, or just looking for fun and tasty recipes to make at home. Someone with much more experienced (as already mentioned by a previous reviewer) will most likely find the recipes basic, however.

The game itself is a great cookbook purchase: Some technologies are just lazy while others are highly convenient. The voice recognition makes it very easy to move back and forth and get more information even while your hands are busy or covered with dough, though it can be frustrating that it tends to recognized many louder noises as a voice command - during one recipe I had it repeat and move back a step dozens of times after a plate would clink or the refrigerator would be closed.
If you like to prepare on your own, you can start the recipe steps at the cooking portion so that you don't have to go through ten extra preparation steps.

"Cooking A-Z" includes a lot of information especially useful for beginners. Preparation terms, vocabulary, ingredients, cooking utensils, possible substitutions, etc are explained briefly, and a selection of "how-to" videos are included. There are recipes for homemade ingredients to use in recipes, such as stock and pizza dough.

The recipes themselves (245 of them) can be searched by keyword, ingredients, country, type of dish... It's very easy to find what you would like to make, and the recipes vary from very simplistic and almost obvious to slightly more advanced. All information is given and a timer is included as well - preset to the necessary time. The shopping list is not the most convenient - this is one of the things in the game that is better off written down as long as nothing is forgotten: the shopping list is out of order and can be hard to go through if you have more than one recipe's worth put down. There is no way to delete ingredients from the shopping list - you simply check them off and they remain on the list for awhile with just a red x.

I would definitely recommend this to the beginner cook or someone cooking with younger children. Most cookbooks come in at around $20 anyway, and Personal Trainer: Cooking contains not only a good amount of recipes, but of variation as well. It is a wonderful introduction whether headed in a serious direction, or just looking for family dinners to prepare.

Genius
This game (if you can call it a game) is very user-friendly. It's easy to navigate and responds to voice commands nicely.

The recipes range from unique to the yummy simpler foods.

There is also a handy little feature that lets you select what ingredients (i.e. onions, pork, curry, etc...) you don't like.

The recipes are super easy to follow, too. I'm looking forward to letting the two boys I take care of (11 and 13) use this game/cookbook to whip something up all on their own. With my supervision of course. ;)