E3 2008: Hands on with What's Cooking? with Jamie Oliver on DS

While you won't be cooking up a f***ing storm in Atari's new culinary adventure, you'll find plenty of motivation for stepping into the kitchen. Far from Hell's Kitchen, Jamie Oliver's more docile approach reaches out with an oven mitt-ensconced hand for those wanting a little help with cooking.

What's Cooking? with Jamie Oliver actually offers two vastly difference experiences, as we observed in our hands-on with the game. An interactive cookbook allows you to actually cook dishes using recipes pulled from Jamie's books, whereas a cooking mini-game mirrors the step-by-step culinary hijinks of other touch-enabled titles like Cooking Mama. We're much more keen on the features planned for the cookbook over the cloned gameplay of the cooking mini-games, based on what we played today in Atari's E3 booth.

Over 100 recipes are planned for inclusion in the final version of What's Cooking? with Jamie Oliver, ranging from tropical fruit salad, crispy duck, poached salmon, paella, and treacle tart (whatever that is). Each recipes includes a detailed ingredient list, which you can conveniently transfer over to an interactive shopping list. The hope is to have you slipping your DS in a pocket, heading down to the market to check off ingredients as you place them in your cart. It certainly looks to be a handy function, especially for those of us who are too lazy to write things down manually.

Once you've gathered the necessary components to a recipe, you can set the DS on your kitchen counter and follow the designated steps until completion. Before cooking, the software provides an overview of the cooking process and details how many steps it requires. Since you'll be dirtying your hands cooking, voice commands enable you to shout 'next' into the microphone to move forward in the recipe. Clever.

Along with the included recipes, 'Get Stuck In' mode gives you free range – literally – to create your own concoctions. Every ingredient, every appliance, and every last utensil is available for use in this mode that allows you to play around in the kitchen. You're able to record recipes, too, saving them for future use or even trading with other players via a local wireless connection.

As far as the cooking game is concerned, it's an underwhelming mix of short form mini-games that have you mixing bowls of ingredients, grilling foods, and decorating plates with finished goods. The appeal of the 25-odd levels remains unclear to us, particularly given that we've already had two satisfying helpings of Cooking Mama. With that in mind, we're more likely to hone in on the interactive cookbook mode when What's Cooking? with Jamie Oliver ships in time for Christmas.