Set to release later this month, I had the opportunity last weekend at PAX to try out Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine for both Nintendo DS and the Wii, and to speak to a member of the design team. This title, developed by Black Lantern Studios and published by Destineer allows even the most culinary illiterate to step into the Kitchen Stadium and compete to earn the title of King of Iron Chefs!

While this is not the first of this type of game to be released for these systems, Iron Chef sets itself apart from Office Create’s Cooking Mama series with increased competition and intensity. While you may be awarded scores, points and medals for successfully completing a dish, Cooking Mama is in large part merely a cooking sandbox. Iron Chef, on the other hand, emphasizes learning the tricks and methods to master a variety of recipes in preparation for the ultimate chef-to-chef contest.

With Iron Chef American: Supreme Cuisine, staying true to the source material was clearly of very high importance. The game follows the highly successful Food Network series in both story and format, allowing Iron Chef America fans to step into the aprons of their favorite Iron Chefs. Select your chef, then pick from 15 secret ingredients, and choose your recipes! Boasting hundreds of dish variations and nearly 300 mini-game tasks, the game attempts to duplicate the feeling of speed and skill that the real Iron Chefs represent.

Gameplay follows the order that one would use if really trying to prepare up to six dishes simultaneously. Mini-games begin with prep work, such as chopping your vegetables and slicing your meat. In an effort to recreate the comical seriousness of the TV show—cooking is, after all life and death—the Chairman barks orders at you, commanding you to SLICE! CHOP! and FLATTEN!  While these mini-games are fun, they can get a bit repetitive. Depending on the number of recipes and their similarities, you may be CHOP!-ing a lot of onions before you can move on to cooking and assembling the dish. At the same time, the possibility of repetition allows the player a chance to master these small skills, and I definitively found myself taking pride in how much better I became at grating the cheese after a little practice.

A particularly cool feature, especially for fans of Iron Chef America, is the inclusion of commentary by Alton Brown. While his audio is only available for the Wii, his likeness appears in both games along with text transcript for the DS. Not only does his voice help with the immersion in the Iron Chef experience, he proves really helpful, explaining how to complete the tasks and offering information about the dishes and ingredients.

One of the biggest differences between the DS version of the game and the version for the Wii is the actions needed to complete the mini-games. With the Wii, the controller must be moved in the direction of the arrows on the screen to complete the task. These movements are meant to mimic what motions one would actually use while preparing these foods in real life. Sometimes this succeeds, but sometimes it does not. While I was a wiz at flattening dough and slicing eggplant, I burned all but one of my hamburger patties, as flipping them off the grill was much less intuitive. I also, quite embarrassingly, failed at boiling water; as I found the task of turning knobs with the Wii remote seemed overly touchy and jerky.

Controls for the DS were much easier, as for most of the food prep you only need to follow the guide on the screen with your stylus. And while this tracing does not mimic real cooking in the way that the Wii controls do, it is less frustrating, and the tactile nature of actually touching the screen instead of just waving your hand through the air makes the actions feel much more concrete and connected to the action on the screen. Timed cooking was much easier to master, with Studio Designer Lisa Mason comparing grilling on the DS to whack-a-mole (wait until the meat or tortillas are cooked just right and then touch them with the stylus, much easier than the Wii’s ‘point, grab and wing the meat off the screen’ approach). So although the DS version is by necessity smaller and does not include all the features available for the Wii (I especially missed the audio), I think that system is a better fit for the game type.

The final stage of the game before turning attention to the judges is to plate up your dishes. In the TV show, not only are you judged on your speed and technique in preparing your recipes, but also on your presentation. This created an interesting problem for game designers. While a computer can judge correct completion of the cooking tasks, and the speed in which you complete them, there is no algorithm to score aesthetics. To get around this while still maintaining the integrity of the Iron Chef model, designers creatively divided the plating portion of the game into two parts: placing the dishes on the correct part of the plate-which is scored, and adding garnishes-which is just for fun. Time is of the essence, so don’t go too wild with lemon wedges and sprigs of parsley, but you can’t help but try to make your plate look extra fancy.

Repetition and frustration at the touchy Wii controls aside, I very much enjoyed Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine. The game looks good, and I found the combination of solid pre-rendered graphics with splashy cartoonish commands works well together with the tone of the game. It’s light and fun -- and I’m sure it will be a big hit with fans of the show, and casual gamers alike.