Looking at the Mindscape website, we find the following comment: “Experts agree that spending 10 to 15 minutes a day on a brain training workout using simple exercises and puzzles can improve the skills needed to achieve greater success academically and in everyday life”. One thing that this doesn’t mention is that this is a concept for someone who isn’t really enveloped in a lot of these activities on an everyday basis. However, there are worse things for you to do with a spare ten minutes each day. There are two basic components to the game - daily exercises or ranked practice. The daily exercises run you through each of the five categories of skills. These include Verbal, Logical, Spatial, Numerical and Memory skills. Each of these categories has three different activities and each activity has five difficulty levels. The five difficulty levels feel a little sporadic at times, where the jump from level 1 to level 2 feels much greater than level 3 to level 4 or even level 1 through to level 5. The practice allows you to tackle any challenge, any time that you want.
If you can't get this, sign up immediately.
In the Logical workouts, you have Colour Tiles, which requires you to arrange a set of tiles so that each of the edges has the same colour, Hexagonal Spin that gets you to spin a pair of hexagons that have mixed colours and try to get them back to normal, and the currently ubiquitous Sudoku. In Memory workouts, you have Follow The Leader, which requires you to follow a series of sequences of light-up tiles, Matching Pairs (which is obvious), and Memory Grid, which has you placing differently coloured and marked tiles back into their original order.
In the Spatial workouts, you have the 4 Colour Puzzle, which gets you to fill in an empty sheet that’s divided into lines with four different colours, in a way that none of them touch (it’s really easy), the Colour Matching has you picking out the two coloured shapes that are the same, whilst Fold the Cube gets you to pick the cube that would have been made from the provided net. In the Numerical Workouts, you have Number Crunch, which requires you to work through a series of multiple-choice answered sums, Mental Arithmetic, which asks you with filling in the signs to complete an equation, and Number Sequence, which gets you to fill in a missing number from a sequence, from a choice of four.
I wonder if Tony feels like he's progressing?
Finally, you have the Verbal workouts, which include a Reading Test that is way too easy to fudge, a Spelling Test that has a series of questions that need you to pick the correctly spelt word, and a Word Search which is pretty much the same as can be found in most newspapers or puzzle books. The issue with these tests is that a few of them are a little too prone to “abuse”, such as the Reading Test and the 4 Colour Puzzle. Others either just seem bland, lack any flair, or fall into the trap of being too repetitive. Regardless, they are light-hearted and easy to get through. If you choose to take part in the daily-testing, you will do five tests a day (one out of each category) and slowly progress through the tests and levels of difficulty. Clicking on the “progress” button will show how your score in each category changes with time.
In all honesty, I personally am probably not the best candidate for such a workout. In my life and work outside of PALGN (yes, I do have a life), I am in constant need of these skills, so my progress is nothing monumental and a few of the tests (Reading mainly) can be disenchanting. However, for people much older than myself - who no longer need such skills in their daily life - or people my age and younger who struggle with these sorts of skills, there is some benefit to undertaking these workouts. Even if the benefits are merely implied, the fact remains that if your brain gets at least a bit of a workout, it’s not going to hurt you.
These are surprisingly tricky.
Technically, the game is solid with a fair amount of variety within the self-generating puzzles, though some will end up being a bit too repetitive. We had a small problem but we concluded that it was due to a dodgy mouse. Graphically, the presentation is just as basic as previous titles from Mindscape, but your background changes are a bit more varied. Regardless, some of the settings are really too dull and lack stimulation. Sound-wise, there have been some more basic sounds added and some light music. Nothing ground-breaking, but better than nothing and, at times, more appropriate than some songs in most MP3 collections.
In simple terms, if you don’t feel the need to run out and buy a DS just to give your mind a little workout, Mindscape’s Brain Trainer does provide something of a more viable option. It is guaranteed to run on the majority of PCs, and it doesn’t have that fangled gadget feel attached to it (for our more mature readers). However, it lacks the flair and ingenuity that came with the DS games, it feels bland at times, it can be easily exploited, and not everyone is going to appreciate these kinds of activities in their spare time. There's nothing wrong with simply running through a few little tests and workouts to get the gears in the head moving. It's just that some people will get more out of it than others.
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