Mind Quiz: Your Brain Coach (Nintendo DS) - Review by Andrew

Introduction

Ever since Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, the Brain Workout market has become almost as cluttered as the Puzzle one. It seems everyone wants to give his or her Grey Matter a little more exercise. It appears that we're just not thinking enough so rather than pay the likes of MENSA to tell us just how clever we are, millions of people are now happy to battle it out in their living rooms to see who can pronounce words properly or find corresponding letters and numbers. Unfortunately, as with puzzlers, many developers miss the mark, missing the magical ingredients that make for the perfect balance of workout and fun. Have Ubi Soft and SEGA got close? Read on and see...

Gameplay

Mind Quiz sets out to gauge just how efficient your brain is but given that you are judged on only two tests it's clearly not measuring your boredom threshold. You should try your two tests daily and while you can select any part of the cart, this is the only section that actually plots your progress. In the first challenge you must match numbers to letters. This is more difficult than you'd imaging especially by the time you reach the teens. The next is simply two chains of numbers where one of these is fixed and the other moves around after each selection. That's it. For the record, our efficiency increased for a few days and then came crashing down as we became more interested in the practice games.

The practice games are actually far more interesting but only open up fully after you've completed two weeks or so on the main objectives. They are all about improving different parts of your brain such as speed or alertness and each of the four sections contains four challenges. Most of them cover standards such as the replication of a musical or visual pattern but others involve your dog collecting falling bones whilst avoiding the bombs. More interesting though are the multi-tasking elements where you might be required to complete a simple slide puzzle whilst also preventing your dog from escaping. It's this level of innovation, which really could have been exploited here but instead the developers have disappointingly seen fit to stay on safer territory.

Controls

Forget your traditional controls, this simply wouldn't exist without the DS' unique capabilities.

Graphics

SEGA have kept things very simple with Mind Quiz and the visuals are best described as newspaper/magazine style. Well-designed and drawn characters and puzzles with flat colors and bold outlines. It works too as the game feels like it's been designed rather than just tacked together thanks to the inclusion of a man (who not only wears a tie but has a rainbow brain) and his dog.

Sound

The audio is quite pleasant without being overwhelming and you'll probably find you'll need some of the more laid back tunes so you can work out that the corresponding letter to 4 is D. There's also some voice over work from a woman who clearly never gets excited over anything but was no doubt thrilled to get this job.

Dual screen

As with all touch screen games this is intuitive but also problematic and while you'll delight in throwing bones at a man with a rainbow brain you may also want to throw your DS at a wall because it can't recognize the number 8. It's these shortcomings that have led other developers to simply allow you to input numbers rather than writing them. You'll have similar problems with the microphone and while you are pronouncing 'banana' in your finest BBC English the DS still can't recognize it. Everything else is fine but these two sections alone will drive you to distraction.

Final comments

Mind Quiz is yet another entry into the brain workout arena, which is full of promise and possibilities but never quite delivers. It's full of the kind or variety which made Big Brain Academy so popular but the main event is so shallow and uninteresting you are unlikely to revisit the game after a week or so. To add to this the flaws in the voice and number recognition make the whole exercise so frustrating you simply won't mind feeling a little dim. After all it's better than shouting at a tiny, dual screened games console. Isn't it?

Pro: Nice Collection of Practice Games.
Con: Main Workout Becomes Repetitive, Poor Number Recognition.
Final score: 4.7

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