New food-related videogames lure players into the kitchen

A new crop of video games is encouraging fans to ignore their parents' advice and play with their food.

Fans slice, dice and feel the heat of the kitchen with a new crop of foodie games that includes 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.

Jamie Oliver, television's Naked Chef, sees his new title for the hand-held Nintendo DS as an interactive cookbook with games.

"I'm looking at this as a digital book with a game rather than a game with a digital book," said Mr Oliver, who has published about a dozen cookbooks and is an active campaigner to improve school meals in Britain.

Mr Oliver's video game title, which hit shelves in October, includes more than 100 mostly exclusive recipes accompanied by mouth-watering images from food photographer David Loftus. It also features games that allow players to "cook" some of the recipes.

What's Cooking? players can really get their hands dirty because voice recognition technology on the DS lets them move forward or backward through a recipe's steps. The game also includes a shopping list creator and recipe storing and swapping capabilities.

Mr Oliver, a father of two, said his six-year-old daughter is already pro at the game.

"My little Poppy loves it. She finds it a bit freaky that her dad is saying, Come on, come on, play the game. Welcome to the test kitchen," he said.

The title that launched the North American food game craze was Cooking Mama, a Japanese import that hit our shores in 2006. It uses the touchscreen and stylus on the DS to let users "cook" everything from pepperoni pizza to cabbage meat rolls. Players also can blow into the DS microphone to "cool off" hot dishes.

"Cooking Mama was a surprise hit" and the game that launched a new cooking game genre in the US," said Sam Kennedy, editorial director at video game fan site www.1UP.com.

The newest title, Cooking Mama World Kitchen for Nintendo's popular Wii console, is just out.

Mr Kennedy said the interactive features in Nintendo's DS handheld (as well as its Wii console) have expanded what a game can be - and that the real recipes in games like Mr Oliver's add authenticity to the genre.

Mr Kennedy he would know. He had his team try some of the recipes in Cooking Mama to see how they turned out.

"They didn't work at all," said Mr Kennedy.

Nintendo, which has sold more than 22.5 million DS systems in the US, has also gotten into the game.

Its new cooking title called Personal Trainer: Cooking has just been released.