Junior Brain Trainer

Junior Brain Trainer

Nintendo’s dedication to improving the nation’s minds and bodies over the past two years has been both admirable and profitable. Wii Fit has been busily stretching housewives' ligaments, Sight Training has been working on our eye-sight and reaction times, while Maths Training’s been exercising those long atrophied mental arithmetic muscles last used when we were 15. It’s a craze that started, of course, with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, a package of microgame tasks designed to exercise our brains daily. Now Avanquest Software is aiming a similar type of game at our children, this latest DS title designed to stretch and improve 6 to 11-year-olds' mental prowess by way of some daily challenges.

Of course, where Junior Brain Trainer has an advantage over its grown-up inspiration is in that is can closely follow the national curriculum to help develop reading, writing, spelling, maths, geometry, logic and problem solving skills, supplementing what children are being taught at school within a game context.

Junior Brain trainer takes most of its cues from Dr Kawashima, encouraging players to spend a little time with the game/ software daily, playing through five different activities. These minigames vary from day-to-day but all focus on one of the game’s core educational areas. However, the tasks themselves lack creativity and are often as basic as filling in a missing word in a sentence, drawing a shape, matching up pairs or completing a simple sum.

As minigames are completed each day more tasks open up, a classic videogame-style reward system to encourage repeat play. Unfortunately the bonus content is quite lacklustre, providing the player with, for example, stories read by blowing into the microphone to turn each page. We’re sure many of the kids who play the game enjoy reading, but being forced to read from a screen when they’re supposed to be playing a game isn’t much fun. Other bonus tasks such as writing out the alphabet or playing hangman are unlikely to set their little hearts aflutter either.

More interesting is the slew of minigames included on the cart, although, again these are very derivative. For example Snake is based on the old mobile phone favourite in which you guide a snake around an environment eating sweets while avoiding bumping into your lengthening tail, Football has you kicking a ball against a wall to remove bricks (similar to old Nintendo favourite, Breakout) while Balloon Pop has you firing slingshots to pop balloons.

Parents hoping that Junior Brain Trainer will make their children’s grades shoot up are probably in for a disappointment. The game is, as with every other title in the genre, primarily about learning how to perform tasks more efficiently through constant practice. There is fun to be had here but children, particularly those at the older end of this game's target audience, would likely be a lot happier with Animal Crossing or Super Mario Bros, titles with which they’d probably learn just as much, while having a while lot more fun.

3 out of 5