where are the good games?

Published under the Personal Trainer series in US, Cooking Guide is one of applications created for the DS. With 245 recipes from around the world all in 1 cartridge, Cooking Guide can be said to be better than most recipes books! It certainly offers functions that a traditional book cannot compete with.

One of those function is voice recognition. If you have your hands tied up preparing or cooking, you only have to say "Continue!" and the guide will read out the next step for you. Can't catch what the Guide is announcing? Just say "Repeat!" and the instructions are repeated for you. The drawback is, you may have to lean closer to your DS or articulate louder to get your voice register.



You can choose several ways to view the recipes: by country, by ingredients (great when you just want to cook whatever that's in your refrigerator!), by requirement (selecting the difficulty level, cook time etc), and by keyword. You can also exclude ingredients. Recipes with those excluded ingredients will be marked by a X. Cooking guide also allows you to resume your recipe from where you last stopped. Pretty handy hmm?

If you are take Cooking Guide: Can't decide what to eat as a game, it will most probably score zero. But as an application, Cooking Guide is brilliant and I expect more of such applications to come out on the DS. As a matter of fact, Nintendo has just came out with My Healthy Cooking in various languages. It'll be interesting if it can best Cooking Guide (once I get my hands on it of course).

I found a local store selling it at S$30 which is in my humble opinion, a reasonable price for an recipe 'book' that provides videos, recipes and other functions.

Rating: Not a game but still Fantastic!