Cooking Japanese with the Nintendo DS

[tantan]

Just an "in case anyone's interested" thread.

The Nintendo DS is a handheld video games system. The main advantages of it is that is has two screens instead of one - one of which is a touch screen that allows you to use a pen to write and point instead of using buttons or keyboards. It also has a microphone which you can use for voice recognition in some software.

Anyway, a lot of non-games have been released for it: brain training, physical exercise software, games designed to teach you how to trade stocks, guides to improve your manners, and so on.

Cooking games are quite popular, so I thought I'd just list all of them in case anyone's interested. All of these have only been released in Japanese. All of links are just from one site - just google game names if you want other screenshots.

Shaberu! DS Ryouri NaviShaberu! DS Ryori Navi

しゃべる！DSお料理ナビ

This one is just like a recipe book. You can browse by ingredients, cooking methods, make a checklist of what have in your cupboard etc. Recipes are step-by-step with pictures. It will say what's written in the steps, and you can speak back to it (for example if you're in the middle of cooking and don't want to press any buttons). You can ask it to repeat, go back, go to the next step, start and stop a timer. There are also some videos for things such as cutting or cooking techniques.

Most of the other games have the same basic features, or are built on exactly the same engine.

Shaberu! DS Oryouri Navi: Marugoto Teikoku Hotel

DSお料理ナビ：　まるごと帝国ホテル

This one was just released. Same series as the previous ones. It features restaurants of this famous hotel. Has a bio of each chef, guide to their restaurants and recipes from each of them. There's about five different restaurants: French, Japanese, Chinese etc. If you click the link, the box cover has the restaurant names on it.

Kenkou Ouen Recipe 1000: DS Kondate Zenshuu

健康応援レシピ１０００DS献立全集

Features about 7 different recipe books: Japanese, French, Italian, sweets etc.

Oishinbo: DS Recipe Shuu

美味しんぼ：DSレシピ集

This game is based on the manga of the same name. I haven't played it much yet, but you can read some of the manga - when you see some food you like you can touch it to go to the recipe. Apart from that I think it has pretty much the same features as the others - videos, guides, searches etc.

Oh yeah, with most of these games you can search for recipes by writing the kanji or kana on the touch screen, which is pretty cool.

I think that's about everything that's been released at the moment. I'm just going off the top of my head for most of this, so if anyone wants more details or specifics on anything etc. just let me know.

There's also a game called Cooking Mama, but it's more of a game than an interactive recipe book. Maybe good for kids.

[srhcb]

There's also a game called Cooking Mama, but it's more of a game than an interactive recipe book. Maybe good for kids.

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That does look like fun!

Here's the eGullet Cooking Mama discussion.

[shinju]

Thanks for this information......more fun food related things to occupy myself instead of doing things I need to such as cleaning, gardening, cleaning, gardening.

[torakris]

My daughter has the first one you listed:

Shaberu! DS Ryouri NaviShaberu! DS Ryori Navi

She has made a couple dishes from it, the curry udon was quite good. I haven't really played with it too much myself though...