Our podcasting guest for episode #5 takes a stab at reviewing a few DS games!
You finally finished Cooking Mama 2 and feel you’re ready to take on the real thing eh? Well then this title is right up your alley.
First off Personal Trainer: Cooking is no game at all. There are no bonus stages or points. You basically have a highly detailed push button multimedia cookbook on your DS. The highly intuitive menus and training instructions make creating tasty mouthwatering morsels, fun for younger chefs (with parental supervision and help) and detailed enough for the those of you who want to get you Iron Chef skills started.
You may be thinking, ”What good is a digital cookbook when I can find cookbooks with many more recipes online or in a bookstore?" I have some answers for that. With its 245 recipes and calm and comforting digital chef voice, this guide makes the cooking process less scary for those who don’t spend much time in the kitchen. In terms of meal preparation, you get checklists for ingredients, videos and full color detailed photos for prepping and cooking, a calculator, and even a cooking timer. If your hands are full, you can use voice commands to "turn pages." Also, there is Cooking A-Z which has cooking terms, and ingredient substitutions, as well as tips and advice to make the work more fun.
You can select recipes in a variety of ways. A very clear menu lets you select by ingredients, country, and keywords. The keyword feature allows you to write in letter by letter using your stylus. Another feature in this menu allows you to set more specific requirements, including calories, cooking time, cooking method, and many others.
Once you have decided on what dish you’re interested in, you can choose the servings you want (1 to 6) which will alter the ingredient checklists and other details so you don’t have to do extra calculations. If you have food allergies or dietary restrictions the settings feature allows you exclude recipes containing ingredients you don’t wish to eat when choosing what to cook.
Having done cooking and baking myself, Personal Trainer: Cooking delivers on the step-by-step cooking process wonderfully. Your "Assistant Chef" has an easy to understand and pleasant voice and is filled with good advice and congratulations upon completion of your dish. The voice navigation is also great if you don’t want a stylus accidentally falling into your meal as you cook. The international recipes ensure a variety of tasty treats for both the vegetarian and carnivores out there. In the end, for a beginning chef, it’s a nice investment at around $20. Happy cooking everyone.
Shouldn’t replay value be a "10", then?
I really like that it lets you exclude specific foods. That’s handy.