 Review By: Siou Choy |
Developer: | Interchannel-Holon |
| Publisher: | Majesco Entertainment | |
| Genre: | Mental Training | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1-2 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Wi-Fi (local) | |
| Buy Now: |   |
OK, let’s start with pure facts:
Fact 1: Mega Brain Boost is a re-packaging of Brain Boost Beta Wave and Brain Boost Gamma Wave, alongside an entirely new game, all wrapped into one concise cartridge.
Fact 2: there are 15 games in total. That being said, please disabuse yourselves of any peculiar notion that this makes Mega Brain Boost some sort of great package deal.
Problem 1: consider, if you will, that the game as a whole…is boring! I must state for the record at this point that I normally love games that get the little gray cells working.
But consider Problem 2: Mega Brain Boost is nowhere near the level of challenge, interest, or presumed efficacy as other brain games on the market, such as the excellent Big Brain Academy.
Problem 3: is the third (or tertiary) problem, and the one which completes the series “one…two…”. Or to put this in blunt terms, problem 3 revolves around the operative term redundancy. There are a (supposed) total of 15 games “to challenge and train your mind” (which sentence leaves me feeling like it’s 1976, and we’re exiting an EST seminar) but a strong majority of said (and supposedly discrete) games are actually the same game with slight variations. Is adding coins any different from adding numbers on flash cards? Musically, this sort of structure is known as a fugue (or to satisfy the very precise among us, a canon, which is a specific type of fugue…but let’s not get into any square vs. rectangle arguments here), and to be honest, playing such a dull, moronic, even pointless game as Mega Brain Boost is more than enough to put the average gamer into a fugue state (a psychological state of extreme disorientation and loss of centering) – hardly the sort of result the developers intended, and quite opposite to the notedly unsupported claims of the game’s PR package.
Admittedly, despite the above (which should prove quite enough in and of itself to steer the curious away from this bit of computerized dreck), the most baffling thing about Mega Brain Boost is exactly why they included the “Match The Kanji Characters” game for domestic (i.e. Western) market consumption. Let’s get back down to facts, here: not too many people this side of the Pacific know kanji. In fact, to my understanding, many Japanese only know a limited number of kanji. So this game basically amounts to a picture recognition game – the sort of which the likes of Milton Bradley used to market to 5 year olds!
I know the game is based on Makoto Shichida’s (likely erroneous if not outright fallacious, to judge by the resultant Mega Brain Boost) “right brain development theory”, but it should be pointed out that the game is designed for an English speaking and reading population. Kanji recognition is one thing for a Japanese release, but in the western world where this system of writing is largely unfamiliar? Shall we play pattern recognition (I make the point of noting it as such, as opposed to “learning”, since, as par for the game, no deeper meaning or correlation is being established, and therefore nothing is actually being learned) with Arabic, Hebrew, Greek or Cyrillic next? What exactly is the point of this exercise?
Posted: 2008-05-03 12:40:40 PST