What's Cooking with Jamie Oliver Hands-On

The cooking genre is certainly expanding on Nintendo's dual-screen handheld, given that these games are now moving toward being a tool rather than gimmicky minigames that are repeated with different ingredients. What's Cooking With Jamie Oliver provides 100 of his original recipes that you can manipulate and experiment with in a virtual kitchen. It acts as an interactive cookbook, but it can also be a handy shopping list if you were to go out and purchase the ingredients yourself.

Not much has changed from our last hands-on, but a notable difference is that Atari has announced that the game will have voice recognition so that if your hands are full, you can move from one page of a recipe to the next by using voice commands. This wasn't implemented yet in the build that we got to try, but we were promised that it will make it into the final product. The recipes are from Jamie Oliver himself, and there are beautiful photographs of the dishes taken by David Loftus. Some examples of the recipes included smoked fish soup, warm squash salad, barbecue Thai chicken legs, and mushroom risotto.

Like in other cooking games, you have a virtual kitchen in which you can chop, mix, cook, and finally plate your delicious creations. Icons are laid out on the top of the touch screen to indicate the different stations in your kitchen. From your ingredient list, all you need to do is drag and drop the ingredient to the right workstation and then you can prepare from there. Using your stylus, you'll mimic moves such as mixing or picking up an egg and hitting it on the side of a bowl to crack it. The tutorial in the beginning will help to situate you in your kitchen, in which you'll go through the relevant steps so that you can start cooking on your own.

The shopping-list feature comes in handy if you decide to take virtual cooking to the next step. The ingredients are listed and itemized so you can sort by type, and it will indicate how much of each item you'll need. The checklist also lets you check off what you've purchased, and you can convert any recipe (yours or Jamie's) to a list so that you have everything you need on your Nintendo DS. There are hundreds of ingredients to play around with, and instructions are broken down into manageable portions so you can follow each step, in real life or in the game.

For those looking for an actual game, there are challenges in which you can re-create up to 25 of Jamie's recipes under a time limit. There are 10 different 3D kitchens to cook in, and you'll have access to all of the utensils you'll need to create that perfect dish. If you've managed to create something worth sharing, recipes can be given to a friend via Wi-Fi. What's Cooking With Jamie Oliver seems like a great way to explore recipes for people who are interested in cooking but haven't had a chance. Bring out that inner chef when What's Cooking With Jamie Oliver arrives in October.