DS Diva

Personal Trainer: Cooking Web site

If you’re not sure whether you want to add Personal Trainer: Cooking to your holiday wishlist or gift-giving list, the new Web site for the software may help you decide. The latest in Nintendo’s Touch Generations genre of DS “games” is now online at www.personaltrainercooking.com. The site is quite detailed, and demonstrates the hands-free voice control (so you don’t get your DS all food-y) as well as other features. There’s a walkthrough and demos of people actually using the “game” while cooking. Actress Lisa Kudrow is on the site, too, cooking kung pao chicken with her niece.

If you preorder Personal Trainer: Cooking on Amazon by Nov. 23, you get $10 off a future video game purchase at Amazon. I ordered it. I’m not a great cook and I only have luck using recipe books for baking, so maybe techonology will work for me. The serving size recalculations and the ingredient shopping list and cost calculator feature are especially intriguing. It even times the meal as it cooks. I hope the voice control works better than automated phone systems, because I don’t want to be hollering, “Continue!,” “Repeat!” and “Last Step!” in my kitchen.

Personal Trainer: Cooking

Personal Trainer: Cooking is sure to be a hit for gift-giving this holiday season. It’s part of Nintendo’s “Touch Generations” series for the DS, and is targeted toward the beginning home cook as well as anyone who wants to learn international recipes. The game is set to be released Nov. 24, and if you preorder it on Amazon.com by Nov. 23, you can get $10 off a future video game purchase. That essentially makes the $19.99 game $9.99!

Nintendo is ramping up the marketing for Personal Trainer: Cooking, and has invited the media as well as the general public to a supermarket spree and cook-off competition in Pasadena, California on Nov. 20.

The event takes place at Whole Foods Market at 465 S. Arroyo Parkway at 10:30 a.m. There, according to a press release, contestants will “scour the grocery shelves” looking for the ingredients to prepare one of the more than 245 recipes included on the Nintendo DS game. Then, the two fastest contestants will be in a cook-off! It’s hosted by David Ruprecht of the Supermarket Sweep game show.

Personal Trainer: Cooking features cooking demo videos and responds to voice commands as users are coached through recipes.