Brain Trainer

Brain Trainer for Android claims to help you build your brain power when it comes to making decisions, doing basic arithmetic problems, and "interpretive challenges". No doubt this game's goal is to piggyback on the many Nintendo DS titles that do the same. I almost wrote "cash in" instead of piggyback, but at $.99 I can't say that without a smile.

The game currently consists of three mini-games...

First there's Master Math. In this game you perform various mathematical equations like '35 x 4' and '7 - 0'. For me the most challenging ones tend to be the bigger division problems like 123 / 3. When I first played my score was 22. The next day I scored 13. I'll be the first to recognize that a sample of 2 days isn't terribly useful, but I will say that problems like '8 - 0' and ' 8 X 0' really aren't in the same league as '140 / 4'.

The next game is Match Color. In this game you see the names of colors in different colors and have to press a button indicating whether all colors are colored with the correct color or not. Try saying that fast. In other words you are recognizing whether Orange is, in fact, orange as quickly as possible. Once again doing this for once color vs four affects the difficulty of any 'problem' not to mention if the first color in a sequence of four isn't right. I also think most people will have more trouble with 'Cyan' vs a more common color like 'Red'. Whenever Cyan pops up I have to work my way through the 4 toner colors in my laser printer to remember Cyan is like pink... I mean blue.

I don't know why a button for a game that is coming soon is here, but that's the case with Detect Max. Couldn't the developer have also made the button be 'Coming Soon'?

Finally, in Count Color (pictured) you are presented with a grid of different colored dots and you have to determine which color appears the most. For me that meant looking and taking an educated guess. I sure wasn't counting them all.

There's really nothing to report with respect to graphics and sound. The controls consist of pressing buttons to indicate choices. Simple enough and that's all that's needed for this type of game. My only criticism is that in some games the 'Stop and Go Back' button is right next to the other buttons and I found myself accidentally pressing it all too often. Likewise, I wonder if, in the case of the arithmetic games my skills at typing on a calculator are growing faster than my ability to crunch numbers.

The game then provides score tracking so you can analyze your performance improvements. As you can guess, I'm not really convinced that this is going to build my brain. I also can't say it doesn't. What I can say is that I feel my brain being using just as much in some of the good physics games or a good Sudoku puzzle and my 'fun meter' goes significantly higher when playing the latter selections. This is an average game. If the aforementioned games sound like a good time to you then go for it... for me this is a 3/5 and not something I'll be using regularly.