Ratatouille is a game roughly based on the animated movie of the same name. You are Remy the rat. You hate typical rat fare and yearn for something better. In order to improve your culinary prospects, you're going to scamper around collecting ingredients and then you're going to practice some cooking. Sound good? Let's proceed.

Ratatouille begins with a conversational exchange between Remy and some other rats (I think they're family) about overcoming his aversion to eating garbage. Remy catches a whiff of actual food, and once he does, there's no going back. (And I can't say that I blame him there.)

The game levels I've managed to navigate so far are split into two basic parts — a side-scroller game and a cooking mini-game. During the side-scroller part of the game, you run around various areas as Remy. You collect pieces of cheese to gain extra lives, and you're also given a certain cooking ingredient you have to find. There is a timer involved. You can't afford to dawdle, but it doesn't mean instant death if you make a wrong turn. There are goodies you can find that will do such things as give you extra time on your timer, and there are things you can manipulate, like launching yourself airborne using a fork stuck into the table, or shooting olives from a pixie-sized cocktail sword.

As with any typical side-scroller game, there are obstacles you need to avoid. Remy can fall off of things. He can get shocked by exposed wires. He needs to watch out for jets of flame when negotiating the gas-fueled cook top. And just for fun, there are these occasional large vessels belching green clouds of rat poison. I'm sure there's more rat peril as things continue, but this is what I've run into so far. As you advance, you may have to go through multiple side-scroller areas before you get to the cooking mini-game portion of your adventure.

The cooking mini-game is completely different from the running around Remy has done up to this point. You'll have a stove with three burners set to low, medium and high heat. Your pans sitting on these burners might be big or small. You have to sort them so the smaller pans are on lower heat and the bigger pans are on higher heat. Above the pans are a line of ingredients — kind of. They're not specific food items; they're little shapes of different colors. You can have up to three pans going at a time. If you need to add ingredients, the little piece you need will flash above that bubbling pan. Collect your ingredient, and drop it in. You'll get a little icon when you're done adding ingredients. When the temperature gauge for the pan gets into the green, you select the pan to serve. At this point, a hand sprinkles a garnish, and you see little directional arrows. You have to click the matching direction on your arrow pad as the garnish is being sprinkled to improve the dish. As you enter each cooking mini-game, it will tell you how many dishes you have to successfully prepare and what star level (quality) the finished product has to be.

In between levels, there is some dialogue between Remy and the other rats (at least where I am). I'm guessing it's from the movie, but I haven't seen the movie, so I can't really confirm that.

You will have tutorials for both areas of the game. This is good for the most part, though some of the instructions didn't really make sense to me. One part said that I was supposed to spear an olive and launch it at a panel to turn off this current flow. I never could figure out how to launch that olive. I suppose it's possible this was explained in the manual, but since I don't have one, I can't say.

Ratatouille does not do traditional save-game slots. If you're in an area where you can click to pause the game (and you don't always have this option), it will give you a save-game code. You have to write this code down and keep track of it. If you turn the game off and want to come back to where you left off and not start over from the beginning, you have to enter this code. While this feature does potentially allow an unlimited number of people to play the game (since there are no save-game slots), I think the whole code thing is very unfriendly to younger children. Either you have to supervise them and write down (and re-enter) their codes, or they have to be old enough to accurately write down and re-enter a seven-digit code.

Ratatouille wasn't really a bad game — it just wasn't my cup of tea. I'm not particularly good at side-scroller games, so they don't tend to hold my interest very long. I enjoyed the cooking mini-game more, but you have to go through the side-scroller parts on each chapter to unlock the cooking game for that level. Given that the ingredients were different-shaped colored blocks, it wasn't like you got the feeling you were cooking any particular dish either. Fans of the movie "Ratatouille" will probably enjoy the chance to run around as Remy, and the cooking game is a fun addition.