Food-themed video games take-off

IT SEEMS that every man plus dog is writing a video game with a food theme.

Atari's What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver, Majesco's Cooking Mama World Kitchen, Ubisoft's Hell's Kitchen: The Video Game and Nintendo's Personal Trainer: Cooking are all in the shops for Crimbo.

Unfortunately the Jamie Oliver game is not one where you can pummel his face with a meat tenderiser, chop him into little bits and serve him in a white wine sauce to the head of BBC light entertainment.

The Naked Chef is a new title for the hand-held Nintendo DS which is an interactive cookbook with games.

Oliver said that he sees the thing as a digital cookbook with a game rather than a game with a digital cookbook.

But the games allow players to "cook" some of the recipes, which is becoming a theme in games coming on the the market. They were all based on the success of Cooking Mama, a Japanese import that hit North America in 2006 and took off.

Now, more interactive features in Nintendo's DS handheld and the Wii console are leading more publishers to experiment with more accurate cooking games.

Apparently if you tried any of the recipes in Cooking Mama they would not work.

Nintendo's new cooking title called Personal Trainer: Cooking is based on a popular Japanese title called Cooking Navi.

Among other things, Nintendo's cooking game includes videos that teach special cooking techniques and features 245 recipes from around the world.

Of course you could go to the kitchen, cook something and have an interactive experience with your creation. You could have a Wii afterwards. But we guess that would mean washing up and that is too much like hard work for gamers. µ

L'Inq
AP