By John Walker on August 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am.
Ever since Dr Kawashima unleashed his brain training onto the DS, there’s been an unstoppable slew of copycat games. The phenomenal success of a game telling you that you’re a bloody genius because you know your seven times table hooked a planet of easily complimented gamers. It’s not a difficult formula to copy – you have a few memory games, some maths ones, a couple of anagrams, and maybe an inventive idea or two. The one thing they all seem to absolutely exclude is any notion of being difficult in any way. Tricky, occasionally. But not difficult. Another very unsubtle interpretation of the genre is the work of an Australian indie team, 3 Blokes Studio, called Brainiversity 2. Which has a half hour demo out now.
At first glance I rolled my eyes at the and-me-ness of yet another brain trainer, and continued to do so after I completed the initial test and came out as Earth’s Smartest Man. However, the ocular somersaulting came to an end when I realised I couldn’t flipping well score the 80 or above required for celebration (a crowd of children cheering, unsettlingly) for an anagram game in the Words section. I’m great at anagrams! If I could only be bothered to apply I’d win a Countdown teapot easily! But damn it those rotating circles of words kept evading me. Plus the maths games, while starting off extremely simple, will throw out questions requiring your fourteen times table, or surprise you with a negative answer.
There’s also memory questions, which appeal to me none at all. However, the unlocked game at the start – a typical Simon Says-style pattern memory game – becomes massively hard incredibly quickly. It seems, quite by surprise, that this might be the difficult brain training game I wanted. I should stress here, of course, we’re talking in very relative terms of “difficult”. I mean, “Not something you can do in your sleep”, rather than requiring advanced calculus or any actual knowledge.
There’s all the same ridiculous restrictions applied to this game as appear in all these trainers. You can only take one ‘official’ stab at improving a score in a day – practise attempts let you keep playing, but it won’t record your performance. This is as pointless here as it is in every other version – a model that would only make sense if you were paying a daily subscription to the game you bought, which you aren’t, which now won’t sodding well let you play it properly. There are also a few concerns that during the fifteen minutes I spent trying to beat the anagrams game, the word “LANKY” came up three times. And “CELLO” twice.
Anyhoo, it’s clearly cheap and cheerful, but it’s surprisingly decent. Half an hour is about as stingy a demo as you could imagine, the meanies. It’s $20 for the full version.
$20 is a lot, especially since the appeal of these games for many was their portability (i.e. this isn’t the best platform).
Simplicity isn’t always bad though. I know a lot of friends got pleasure from doing Kawashima’s simple stuff quickly. A sprint rather than a 400m.
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Edutainment must be expunged! Perfidious parasitism on pure gaming!
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Did anyone else notice the word Congtratulations in the image?
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For something similar I’d recommend “Brain Training for Dummies”. It’s a program made by those people who make “MS Office for Dummies” books and everything. While it doesn’t tell you your “brain age” like the DS game (whatever that means) it is good for excersising ur brain if u like puzzles. I got my mum addicted to it anyway….
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Contratulations! Your loan has been pre-improved!
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142
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wait, I’m bad, 182
I guess that is why I go to school in less than a week again …
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Exams are never good in games. Like in those Sherlock Holmes games it had this horrible part where suddenly Holmes would ask Watson (you) to answer a question about the case. Sometimes the questions made no sense, or the answers were completely bonkers and required carefully reading several boring books. And the whole thing is silly since Holmes already knows the answer anyway.
I played Brain Age for awhile. Some of the advanced games were very difficult to get the littel rocket to go off. It drove my wife crazy. She was also addicted to the Dr. Mario rip off that came with it. That made things worse since the game required you to jump through hoops to play the little reward game. It was fun to yell “prickly pear” (or whatever) at the screen though. Oh my, he hates those!
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I like edutainment. My dad was a teacher and had all kinds of educational games on his BBC-B — those games seem to blend seamlessly into Repton and Revs in my memory.
Of course, as a grown-up you need edutainment along the lines of undergraduate-level math to get anything out of it, which nobody seems to be making. Meanwhile, I’ll go play Pontifex* and pretend I’m still studying engineering/Gomez Addams.
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There’s nothing edutaining about a piece of software whose programmers can’t even be bothered to spell check their own game. Entertaining, yes.
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I think the market for gore-edutainment is wide open and just waiting for someone to snap it up with a game like “Traiil Of Tears” Where you play an Native American whos family is murdered before his very eyes (or hers) and is forced to travel the trail of tears and you see all sorts of horrible things ;P Or maybe a smiliar game where you’re just an Iraqi living in a major city on Shock and Awe night and each time you play the game you’re a random citizen and get to see what it is like to live through something like that (or not live through) from a first person point of view.
I really think video games could be used to teach people something besides grade-school math and how to shoot people if you had pin-point accuracy aim already.
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