Personal Trainer: Cooking Hands-On

As the Nintendo DS (and now DSi) tries to blur the line between handheld consoles and high-tech gadgets, it's also turning into an interactive cookbook. Already released in Europe and Australia as Cooking Guide: Can't Decide What to Eat?, Nintendo announced at its Media Summit that Personal Trainer: Cooking will be coming to North America just in time for the holidays. This game, or tool, will feature more than 245 recipes with instructions and a video to guide cooks in the real kitchen.

Recipes from around the world are categorized so you can make meals that originate from Argentina, Portugal, Thailand, and many other countries. Although we weren't able to try out any of these recipes to see how they actually taste, looking through some of the recipes gave us a hint of what to expect. Usually, you'll find dishes that are popular but not necessarily the most traditional. The traditional dishes sometimes do take a bit more effort, but these recipes seem to require basic kitchen skills rather than an Italian-government-sanctioned pizza oven.

You can select individual ingredients to find recipes that use chicken or beef if you have a particular ingredient in mind to use. All recipes have the amount of time it takes to make on them, as well as the number of calories. You can search by specific requirements if you're looking to consume a certain number of calories, which is a nice addition, but people who enjoy food do not necessarily like a number associated with their meals.

When you decide to take the plunge and begin following a recipe, you can use voice commands to tell the DS to flip back a page, repeat, or continue to the next step. You'll start off with a list of ingredients and then move on to preparation. When a "more details" icon flashes, you can click on it to get a video demonstration. For example, if you weren't sure how to chop an onion, the video does an excellent job of showing you how it's done. Instructions are read out loud so you don't have to read your DS or touch it for that matter.

One of the chefs at the JW Mariott where the Nintendo Media Summit was held did a demo in a makeshift kitchen using Personal Trainer: Cooking. He mentioned that the instructions were very detailed and had to jump through a few steps when he was making sole. We noticed that he did run into some issues when he was talking because Personal Trainer would repeat or wouldn't register when the chef told it to continue. This could get frustrating if you're in a busy kitchen with the fan blowing and the noise of sizzling meat drowning out your commands.

Personal Trainer: Cooking does seem like an intriguing, alternate way to have your recipes dictated to you if you don't have a sous-chef helping you out. The program includes tips and advice, as well as a place to keep notes or mark your favorite recipes. The calendar also tracks when you made a particular dish so you can see when and how often you made chicken teriyaki. The mouth-watering photos made us hungry for real food, so we hope to eventually try out some of these recipes to see how they turn out because that is the most important part of a recipe cookbook.

Aspiring chefs can start cooking up a storm when Personal Trainer: Cooking is released on November 24.