Making food Nintendo style – We review Personal Trainer: Cooking

You too, can make stock image-quality food!

I remember vividly when the Nintendo Game Boy came out. I was 12 years old, and the kids down the street got one. I was so jealous. Dreams of Tetris and Super Mario Land haunted me. I schemed ways to buy my own Game Boy or at least get down to my friends’ house at every opportunity to beg them to let me play it. I remember thinking: One day there’s going to be a handheld system in color that does everything.

Turns out, my prescient twelve year old self wasn’t far off the mark. Full color, amazing handheld gaming is now a reality. Between the Nintendo DS, PSP, and iPod Touch / iPhone, the market is covered.

So how do you make something truly unique and memorable in a saturated market? You start to think outside the box. Nintendo has been absolutely excelling at thinking outside the box in the last two years, with their “Revolution” that nobody thought would amount to anything (only except it’s the best selling next gen console in this current generation), and their absolute domination of the handheld market with their Nintendo DS. Therefore, it comes as no great stretch that they are once again thinking outside the box with software as well as hardware.

It started with Brain Age. A “game” that was sort of not a game. From that grew “TouchGenerations” – a line of Nintendo products designed to entice a new generation of people to what have traditionally been considered “gaming” machines. Specifically, TouchGenerations includes software such as Brain Age, Wii Music, and Flash Focus. Some are games, such as Nintendogs and Mystery Case Files, but some are personal enrichment tools. Today we’ll be looking at Personal Trainer: Cooking, which by all accounts, I cannot really justify calling a game.

Since it’s not a game, let’s start with what it is: It is an electronic recipe book with step-by-step instructions, well-categorized recipes,  a great presentation, and innovative delivery format.

The primary interface is simple enough for Mom to use

I was expecting some sort of sense of achievement or progress, some goal. That’s what would have made this a game. However, there is not. You get a medal when you cook something, and you can look at  a calendar to see what you made on a certain day, which shows little medals on it for days that you finished cooking something, but other than that, this is nothing more than a gloriously organized recipe storage device.

There is no mystery to using Personal Trainer: Cooking. I think this wins the highly coveted award of “something my mom could actually use without my help,” which is saying a lot. Trust me on this. You can navigate by voice, or by stylus. You are presented with a very colorful, intuitive, large interface as a primary menu.  The Cooking “A-Z” is a glossary of terms, which includes high quality images of individual ingredients as well as utensils. The Shopping List feature is pretty great. You can select recipes you want to make, select individual ingredients from those recipes, and then the shopping list will present  you with a checklist and a calculator that you can take to the store with you.

I’ve tried other electronic shopping aids and recipe organizers in the past, and I will say without hesitation that this is the best one I have ever used. The only downside to the shopping list function is that the check boxes are too small to use with your fingers, so you must use the stylus, which means going two handed. It would have been nice if they could have figured out a way to use the shopping list one-handed.

The actual cooking section is about what you would expect. Each recipe is broken down into individual steps—sometimes too many. They take nothing for granted. If you have to stir something, that’s a step.

Basically you are presented with spoken instructions. You don’t really need to follow along with the visuals if you don’t want to. The narrator’s voice is pleasant and as non-annoying as possible. He sounds like a happy grandpa. When a step is completed, you can say “Continue” or “go back”. This voice recognition system pretty much fails, however. I don’t actually think it’s the fault of the software—it’s probably a limitation of the DS hardware. With the DS on the counter next to my food prep area, I had to shout directly at the DS in order to get it to recognize my “continue” command; and even then, sometimes it thought I said “go back” and went backwards a step. In the end, I found the big “continue” arrow to be more useful, even though it was inconvenient to pick up a stylus to touch the screen. If your hands are full of raw meat or grease or something, you’re definitely going to want to focus on using the voice commands.

For my test case, I chose the recipe for Welsh Rarebit. Rarebit is basically toast with a cheese sauce on top. It seemed simple enough, sounded tasty, and I had all the ingredients necessary. My kids helped me with the steps and in the end we had a pretty tasty dish that none of us had ever tried before. It wasn’t exactly “Lisa Kudrow” style idealistic (see the video above), but it was pretty darned close. The food was good, and it came out like the picture.

Welsh Rarebit a la Nintendo. Made by Chef Brian.

One of my favorite features is the Browse by Country search. You can select a country from a “draggable” world map and click on it to highlight recipes from that region. I do, however take major exception with the fact that my cultural home country of Poland is not represented. They even have Australian recipes on there. Australian! Sigh.

The international recipes are somewhat dumbed down. They tend to use ready-made mixes as ingredients. For example, the Thai Tom Yum soup calls for Tom Yum paste that you can buy at a grocery. This takes most of the personal touch out of it, and it becomes a generic “just add water, meat, and vegetables” kind of thing. Of course, making your own Tom Yum seasoning from scratch would very likely be beyond the scope of this software which bills itself as a “trainer”. I was curious to find, however, that the curry used in their Keema recipe (a common Indian dish) was made from scratch. I’m not sure why they lazed out on Tom Yum. I was also excited to see Vietnamese cuisine represented, with recipes for Goi Cuon and Cha Gio rolls among a few other dishes.

Another nice feature is the “Servings +/-” button. You can adjust the servings and it will automatically adjust the ingredient list on the fly.

If you are even remotely interested in cooking, and you have a Nintendo DS, this is a must buy. There are a few tweaks they could make to perfect this software, such as better voice recognition (or a way to use software to overcome crappy DS mic hardware) and a way to download new recipes, but overall this is a great way to simplify cooking, expand your repertoire, or introduce kids to the steps involved in preparing a good meal.

Oh, Nintendo: I have one other feature request; Please make a way to help clean up after the fact…. Thanks.

The unglamorous side of cooking