dagoss's America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking review

I think we might define "shovelware" differently. I don't see the label as appropriate for just any game that's licensed and/or casual. Shovelware is genuinely bad, low-effort software that fails to do anything to distinguish itself and warrant a recommendation to the consumer, except maybe show up in bargain bins for cause. In my mind, genre doesn't have anything to do with whether a game is actually shovelware.

I enjoyed your review immensely, aside from that minor quibble. It's difficult to imagine anyone else ever coming along now and giving the game a fairer shake, or reporting findings more engagingly and convincingly. I too bought this game, in a bargain bin, and I just haven't given it a shot myself. Like you, I have ready access to cookbooks but a cramped kitchen. I have a whole heavy shelf of some of the obvious cookbooks, in fact, but no America's Test Kitchen volumes.

Here's a sentence near the end of your review that you might want to look over again: "If you don’t cooking much and like the idea of having a digital tutorial, Let’s Get Cooking is actually a great option."

Thanks for contributing this excellent review and helping expand the site's quality coverage beyond the expected.

Thanks! I was actually inspired by your recent Animal Crossing Clock review to look for something weird to review.

I think this game looks like shovelware, but probably isn't, so maybe I didn't convey that properly. I think if you just showed the cover to random people and asked "is this shovelware?" you'd probably get a few "yes"s. This is also a weird title that's high quality but low effort (it's basically the same as Personal Trainer: Cooking but with different recipes swapped in).

I have yet to try an ATK recipes and end up with something truly bad or way off kilter. There's one exception: a tofu and mustard green soup. I was not aware that mustard greens are spicy and tofu is already a hard sell to my family. Anyway, there's a black skull drawn over that recipe now, as a warning if anyone finds the book after I'm gone.

(Side question: what's with the external link in paragraph 6 not working. It's not critical to the review, but still not sure why it won't work.)

I fixed it for you. It looks like you probably drafted your review in Microsoft Word, which by default includes "smart quotes" that are the bane of virtually every writer's existence. There is nothing "smart" about them, and their sole purpose seems to be to confound web sites. There is a way to disable them, but Microsoft has made it fairly convoluted and changes it all the time in an apparent attempt to prevent people from being able to reliably rid themselves of that particular menace. Anyway, I just updated your review to include regular quotes instead, which made everything work.

I went all in on this game now. On Mother's day, I made breakfast for everyone using the stuffed french toast recipe I found in it. Turned out great, despite my misgivings about using water in the "custard." I did copy the recipe out of the DS and onto a piece of paper rather than dealing with the DS in the kitchen.