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Personal Trainer: Cooking Review
Written by Chris Buffa on Wednesday, November 26, 2008
245 recipes from 27 countries, superb user interface, simple to comprehend instructions, helps you create shopping lists.
Recipes that require alcohol are a problem for younger chefs, overly sensitive microphone, not enough North and South American dishes.
Up until Personal Trainer Cooking, our range of dishes included rice, soup and the occasional hamburger, so Nintendo deserves kudos for teaching us how to make empanada, jambalaya and seafood risotto. This simple to use interactive DS cookbook features 245 recipes from 27 countries, as well as helpful tips on how to prepare its tasty looking meals. It probably won't transform you into an Iron Chef, but at least it'll help you move beyond boiling water.
Personal Trainer Cooking features a wide range of dishes broken down by ingredients, calories, country and prep time. If beef's for dinner, simply choose that category and you'll whip up that Tagliatelle with Meat Sauce in no time. A disparity exists between chicken and beef dishes (22 to 38) as well as North/South American meals to Asian ones, but several meals will appeal to you and your friends.
To help everyone out, Nintendo created a user-friendly interface that makes searching and cooking enjoyable. In addition to making a personal shopping list, there are also step-by-step instructions on how to prepare each dish, along with video demonstrations. You can even control the game's digital chef with your voice by speaking into the DS' microphone in order to move to the next step. Interference (such as chopping or clanging pots) screws with the technology, but for the most part, you shouldn't have a problem figuring out what to do.
Obviously, a cookbook is only as good as its recipes, and while Personal Trainer Cooking gets a passing grade, we wish Nintendo did a little more research into American cuisine. We also wanted more options for certain meats. Prosciutto is amazing, but there's only one recipe. The same goes for crabmeat. Three recipes for crab? Come on.
Then there's the alcohol issue. This is an E-rated game, yet a few of the dishes require white/red wine or sake. That's fine for us, as we're legal to drink, but it'll pose a problem for younger gamers.
That said, Personal Trainer Cooking has plenty of tasty looking meals and a marvelous user interface. Whether or not all this stuff is good remains to be seen, but its fajitas, chili and macaroni and cheese looks drool worthy. Besides, at $19.99, it costs less than most of today's cookbooks, so go ahead and give it a try. Who knows, perhaps you're the next Bobby Flay.
