Here is some information about me that you absolutely do not need to know. I hate cooking. Really, I find little need for it in my life, as going through the effort of creating a good meal is expensive, time consuming and oftentimes more complicated than it needs to be, especially when I’m hungry and am only cooking for myself, which is pretty much every time I go near a kitchen, because I live a lonely life governed largely by the primal commands of my body.
Seriously, I have a point here somewhere.
Cooking is not a favorite pastime of mine, or even a mildly enjoyed chore, and yet I still found chopping vegetables on my DS touch screen in What’s Cooking? with Jamie Oliver strangely satisfying. Not entirely “fun.” But satisfying. What’s Cooking? isn’t so much a game as it is a software toy, and a cooking tool, meant to fill out the software library of the many DS owners who bought their system for Brain Age or another of Nintendo’s notorious “ungames.” Users who are largely uninterested in typical “video games.” The title assists in the kitchen in several ways, most notably as an interactive recipe book and shopping list. The recipe book walks users step by step through their choice of one hundred Jamie Oliver recipes, which can be filtered based on course, ingredients, prep time and several levels of vegetarian options. (A note for vegetarians: While What’s Cooking is very vegetarian friendly, containing 45 recipes with no meat products, it doesn’t offer much for vegan chefs, as many of those 45 recipes will include other animal products such as milk, eggs, butter or cheese.) Once a recipe is selected, the ingredients can be sent over to the mobile shopping list, a tool that helps users organize and shop for the ingredients. Items for the shopping list can also be selected from a list of all ingredients in the game, or typed in by the user. The list can also be sorted by type of food, allowing the shopper to view similar items together while shopping. While novel ideas, and useful for preparing the recipes in the game, these functions seem much more unwieldy than their analog equivalents, especially the shopping list, which has a fairly limited number of ingredients.
The second big component of What’s Cooking is the cooking game, which is divided into several game modes. First is the “Test Kitchen,” where the game will walk the player through one of the many recipes of the game and rate them on how well the dish is prepared in game. Second is “Stuck In” mode, where the player has full access to the tools, ingredients and areas of the kitchen, and can come up with their own recipes, which the game will record and save. Finally, the cooking game includes a “Cook Off” mode, where the player will race against the clock to prepare dishes as quickly as possible. All three modes will have the player switching between stations in the virtual kitchen, performing simple gestures on the touch screen to manipulate food into a state worthy of serving. This includes mixing, slicing, rinsing, boiling, baking, refrigerating, arranging and much more. A variety of tools are available to use, and each is controlled through simple actions on the DS touch screen. Most of these tools are well controlled, though they generally lack the intuitiveness of cooking in the real world. The motions in the game also lack some freedom, which prevents users from making serious errors and keeps the food looking good, but restricts the would-be chef when they try to be more experimental, which particularly dampens some of the potential of “Stuck In” mode. Overall, though, it is a satisfying feeling to run through a recipe, performing all of the actions and ending up with a decent looking meal.
The main problem with the cooking game is that there is very little sensory feedback to the food that you prepare, which is less of a problem with What’s Cooking and more of a problem with the “Cooking Game” genre. Yes, the visuals are decent, and provide subtle hints about the readiness of the food, only slightly impaired by the graphical limitations of the Nintendo DS, and the sounds of the kitchen are well done, but the cooking aspects leave you craving aromatic feedback, and more importantly, a way to taste the concoction to see if it is any good, both impossible in a game at this point. When you are finished with a meal you are rewarded by a star rating and a verbal assessment by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, but you’re still hungry. Playing the cooking game is ultimately a cost effective way of testing out your skills at actual recipes, saving money on ingredients and saving time using a time skip function in the game, but when you’re finished you have very little additional knowledge about whether that dish was to your liking, or whether you would actually be any good at making it than if you had simply read the recipe or looked at a picture or video of it being done.
What’s Cooking? With Jamie Oliver is ultimately a good choice if you are looking for an interactive cookbook, especially if you are a fan of Jamie Oliver and his recipes. However the game portions fail pretty thoroughly because, while some of the individual actions are fun to pull off, they hold limited appeal. Potential chefs would probably be better served by attempting to cook in an actual kitchen because of the ability to actually eat the food that you cook, and the additional freedom to prepare the meal any way you want it, despite the extra money and time required to buy ingredients, prepare the food, and clean up afterwards. Meanwhile, people looking for a game would probably find the digital kitchen a fairly dull destination for their gaming dollar. That said, the game could be perfect for younger demographics, especially children looking to play chef who aren’t quite ready for the real thing, but it doesn’t hold up for people who could actually go out and prepare these meals.
If you have a DS owner and foodie on your holiday list, this may be the perfect gift.
ComicsOnline gives What’s Cooking? With Jamie Oliver 2.5 out of 5 stars.
(What’s Cooking? was developed by Keen Games, and is published by Atari.)
Editor’s Note: Hey Erin, Jamie Oliver is also known as “The Naked Chef”. If you were wearing clothes while reviewing this game, maybe you were doing it wrong?
