AppCraver » Educational

Brain Exercise Keeps You Thinking Young

Michael Alexander — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:30:23 +0000

Brain Exercise – I just finished working out with Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima and I think I might have overdone it because my head hurts.

If you want to stay mentally sharp, you need to work your brain as though it were a muscle. Brain Exercise, from Namco Networks America, gives you a series of tasks – searching for patterns, solving arithmetic problems, finding the most-oft used number in a grid, recalling memory puzzlers and so on. Many of the tasks are similar to those in an IQ test although the main purpose of Brain Exercise is to, well, stem the loss of precious brain cells.

Without getting too much into the fine points of anatomy, Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima flexes your brain’s lobes. The temporal lobe, for example, governs shape perception and the parietal lobe governs spatial perception.

Brain Exercise has three modes: Brain Training, Brain Age and Quick Play. Each mode also has easy to hard levels and you must also race against the clock. There are different levels in each of the three modes and you’ll need to successfully complete each level before unlocking the next one.

The best way to start is with the Quick Play mode, which consists of short exercises, just to get the feel for what you need to do to sharpen your wits.

The idea is that if you exercise daily, your brain gets “younger,” and the Brain Age mode is the way you chart your progress. At the moment, my brain is equivalent to that of a 37-year old, which is pretty good considering that my kids think I’m already senile. A 20 is supposed to be tops.

If you’re any good at Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima, or your ego can stand it, you can download scores and play against two to four players on the same device.

I don’t care much for games that seem more like work than play, but Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima is lots of fun. It’s the kind of problem solving you’ll keep coming back to just to see if you’re holding your own against the tides of age.

rating: 8/10
app_name: Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima

Who Has The Biggest Brain? Sizes Up Facebook Friends

Casandra Armour — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:30:31 +0000

You can insist that size doesn’t matter, but Playfish’s Who Has The Biggest Brain is only helping to perpetuate such stereotypes. For shame. Who Has The Biggest Brain iPhone app is a competition, linked with social networking giant Facebook, that prompts the user to solve as many seemingly simple puzzles as possible in the one minute allotted in each of four categories: analytical ability, calculation, memory and visual processing. Each category has its own mini-games, 12 total. The puzzles deal with arrangements, order, repetition, spacial evaluation and similar concepts. A brain size is then derived from performance and compared with that of Facebook friends who also play. Be forewarned, it can be humiliating!

Who Has The Biggest Brain has several options on the home page — Play, Practice, Profile and Friends. A more games button is also on the main page and opens Safari to the Playfish site to explore other iPod games available.

Practice gives the user a shot to walk through all twelve of the mini-games available, without the score counting toward their profile.

Profile shows the highest scores and averages for each of the 12 games in Who Has The Biggest Brain. Even after multiple plays, it shows I still haven’t competed in four of them, its a nice surprise to find that I have more to discover in the game.

The Friends page shows my ranking alongside that of my Facebook friends who participate. I’m in last place, but prepared to defend my poor scores with the burden of having to make notes and take screen shots while playing, for the sake of the review.

Tapping Play, of course, engages the user in the game. Each round of Who Has The Biggest Brain begins with a greeting from your pastel colored host. “Let’s test four areas of your brain, one at a time, starting with your analytical ability,” an adorable animation in a white lab coat tells me in a speech bubble. I click the green box with check mark, to continue.

The games seem so rudimentary at first. For example, my first analytical challenge was a random arrangements of blocks appearing, and I had to select how many there were. They fall in tricky 3D configurations that can confuse, but I seem to do well with the spacial challenge. In my calculation game, I have to select answers to equations, which my ACT scores will tell you is not my forte. A childlike game of memory with cards and simple shapes is next, matching hearts, clovers, stars and more. The lucky charms’ cards will switch places though, increasing the difficulty as play goes on. Lastly, placing the correct missing puzzle pieces to complete illustrations also proves to be tough in the visual category.

At the end of my first game a trophy was unlocked, but my brain was apparently only 1,347 cm. Who Has The Biggest Brain labels me “A missing link brain.” Ouch.

In another play, I had to select the heaviest items on a set of scales. The scales tipped almost instantly, weighing something heavier, like a flamingo, versus something small such a piece of sushi. But after a few tries a second and third set of scales would appear and determining the heaviest set of objects became the goal. “Are two pieces of sushi heavier than a cupcake?”

Disappointments were few in Who Has The Biggest Brain, other than downgrading to a dog-sized brain after another particularly sloppy round of play. I would have liked the Facebook connection to be more than my profile pic on the screens and those of my friends on the Friends page, playing against one another or initiating specific challenges might be fun.

While I understand it may undermine the spirit of a timed puzzle, but it bothers me that there no ability to pause in Who Has The Biggest Brain. A game isn’t saved or can’t be resumed if the app is exited during play, either. The sound can’t be turned off, which is unfortunate as it serves no function in the game. It may help the player to mind the time, but a clock in the upper left corner does the same.

Who Has The Biggest Brain is a great test of basic logic and reasoning. It really offers longevity in its variety of games and competition-fed challenge to improve against friends and associates.

app_name: Who Has The Biggest Brain?
rating: 9/10

Dapple Mixes Up the Match-Three Genre

Michael Alexander — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:30:31 +0000

Dapple – If you’ve played Aurora Feint, Bejeweled or other games where you line up three or four similar objects to eliminate them, then you already have a good idea of what Streaming Colour Studios’ Dapple is about.

Dapple comes with a twist though. You have to match paint blobs by first mixing two complementary colors and then aligning four blobs of the same color to eliminate them.

Dapple’s graphics are bright, lively and well rendered and the soundtrack and SFX are engaging. If you like mix-and-match games, you’ll get the hang of it quickly, although Dapple is more challenging than most games I’ve played in this genre.

At each turn you’re give a color-tipped brush, which you must mix with a complementary color on the board. For example, mix the yellow paint on the brush with a blue blob to make the blob green. Tap the blob once to get a preview of the mix and how that affects the colors in the adjacent blobs. You need at least four blobs of the same color to remove them from the board.

At the higher levels, brown squares with a dab of color in the middle drop into view. To eliminate them, you need to match the color in their middles. The brown squares are a bit of a priority because they spread to adjacent squares, making it more difficult to eliminate them.

If you match at least six colors at once, you’ll receive a water drop bonus, which explodes nine squares surrounding it. If you match eight or more paint squares, you’ll receive a diamond bonus, which explodes all the paint blobs of the same color on the board.

From the home screen on Dapple, tap the appropriate button to start or resume a game, learn how to play, options, high scores and credits. Under Options, you can adjust the soundtrack and SFX, reset game playing tips, enable hints and color-blind mode.

Dapple has three modes: Classic (free play), Timed (play against the clock) and 2-Play (play against a friend on the same device). In Timed mode, you also have the options of Easy, Medium, Hard and Ridiculous.

Dapple has a lot going for it, but I’m not sure I would be willing to pay the usual asking price of $4.99 for another match game. However, Dapple is on sale at the moment for $2.99 (40 percent off) and that sets it off from the regular crowd.

app_name: Dapple
rating: 9/10

Word Warp is Best Word Game for iPhone

Andrew Portela — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:30:43 +0000

Word Warp! I love this game and everything about it. This is probably the one iPhone app that I have used everyday since I have downloaded it. The object of the game is exactly like that of Text Twist if you are familiar with it. If not, basically all you have to do is make the most words you can using the 6 letters presented — in order to go to the next level you have to make a word using all 6.

The game is very addicting and allows you to leave in the middle of a game and return to where you left off. I love this feature because it constantly keeps me coming back for more so I can continue building up a high score.

If you click the info button on the bottom right corner, you’ll find directions for the game and a few options. Players can set a time limit for each set of words. I like to keep mine under 3 minutes because I find that if there is no rush in the game then it loses its appeal. There is also the option to use an alternate word list and a button to check out more apps made by the same people, MobilityWare.

There is something about word games that I love, especially when they are mobile and be played anytime anywhere. Word Warp is my first go-to game when I find myself out of the house and not doing anything. Every time you see me sitting on the train or in a waiting room I am listening to music and playing some Word Warp. My hat goes off to the people of MobilityWare.

app_name: Word Warp
rating: 10/10

The Number 14 Adds up to Good Times

Andrew Portela — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:30:26 +0000

I have been writing a bit about word games, that seems to be a popular thing for the iPhone at the moment, however Number 14 brings a number game to the iPhone. This number game is a very simple game that requires you to take the 4 numbers that are given and add, minus, multiply, or divide them in any sequence in order to end on the number 14. The game seems simple enough, but to be honest it takes some thinking to complete it properly — and you get ranked by how long it takes to solve the problem.

When you win, Number 14 shows how much time it took for you to complete the problem and you can either discard it if you’re not happy or store it in the game’s memory. I like this feature because you don’t have to waste pointless memory space unless you are proud enough of your time and want to record it. The info section shows what Number 14 is about and how it should be played along with a sample problem.

What surprised me most about Number 14 is that it was developed by middle school student Jeffrey Barg. This young man learned to program iPhone apps and made a game called Nim that was inspired by his middle school math teacher. Now he has moved on to developing Number 14 and I must say it is a very impressive concept. When I was in middle school all I was worried about was hanging out with my friends and chasing around the middle school girls — writing a software program never crossed my mind. I’m sure we are going to see more from this young app developer as the years go by.

app_name: Number 14
rating: 8/10

Master Your iPhone Keyboard With iType

Allison Glennon — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:00:23 +0000

Whether you are a typo-prone fumbler like most of us or a shining iPhone prodigy like some precious few, iType has just what you need to respectively hone or prove your skills. New from iggyGames, the makers of Chess Puzzles, iType is two games in one free application: Word Speed and Word Attack.

Word Speed is your basic typing test: words appear on the screen and you have to type them as fast as you can. They appear in groups of four or five and are then colored according to how well you do, green meaning you got the the word right and red meaning you got it wrong.

For each round you are given 30 seconds to get as many words right as you can and at the end of each round you are given your speed in words per minute (wpm) and your accuracy with a percentage.

Word Attack works on the same premise as Word Speed but has a creative twist. Described as a “game of typing survival” in the instructions, in this game you are no longer racing the clock but the words themselves.

Words scroll across the screen, right to left, from different levels on the screen and you are to type them correctly before they hit your “life bar” on the far left. If you spell the word correctly then it disappears and it no longer a threat. On the other hand, if you misspell a word, or you can’t spell it in time, then it will continue on and eventually hit your life bar. With each hit your life bar will begin to shrink and turn blue. Once it is all blue the game is over and you get to see how many words you spelled correctly. The more words you spell correctly, the faster the words will move across the screen, forcing you to improve your speed.

In each of these iType games it is helpful to know that “space” is the same as hitting “enter,” once you hit it you will be able to move on to the next word. Also, in iType both games can be played in either portrait or landscape, your choice.

app_name: iType
rating: 7/10

GRE Vocabulary Scramble Will Increase Your IQ

Derek Moore — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:00:52 +0000

It is common knowledge that educational games like GRE Vocabulary Scramble increase memory and IQ. But an important variable of worth is also how much fun the game actually is. Education is great but in order to enjoy learning, the teaching method is going to have to be truly exciting.

GRE Vocabulary Scramble is a combination of two games. It is mainly a vocabulary test extraordinaire aimed at students practicing to pass Graduate Records Examinations (GRE). But it is also a challenging word descrambler that can be a helpful tool for anyone looking to improve their language skills.

Here’s how GRE Vocabulary Scramble works: The definition of a word appears at the bottom center of the screen. You must then spell the correct word that matches the definition in the spaces provided. You can hit the ‘Hint’ button as many times as you want and it will input one letter at a time to fill in the correct answer. Once you think you know what the word is, you can click the ‘Solve’ button and have at it. It’s that simple.

But here’s the twister – you are also provided with your word onscreen with all the letters out of order. The game does not consider this cheating, even though we all know it is. How often are you stuck pondering a word’s definition when coincidentally the word’s letters magically appear — though scrambled — to guide you to right conclusion? Although it’s a helpful feature, we would like the option to use the jumble or turn it off for increased difficulty.

GRE Vocabulary Scramble is very informative and easy to use, but we prefer infotainment and the vocabulary scramble feels like a very slow way to learn new words. We suggest spicing it up in any way possible. Add some graphics or even an interesting background instead of the flat white. Add some moving “Congratulations!” fireworks or something shiny. Anything to hold the attention of the ADD-generation. I played with GRE Vocabulary Scramble for about ten minutes before I just couldn’t handle any more.

If you’ve got a great vocabulary or you’re a genius word descrambler, you will do very well at this app. And it is timed, so watch your step and keep focused.

app_name: GRE Vocabulary Scramble
rating: 7/10

Brain Tuner Is a Simple Math Quiz

Fred Krueger — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:31:03 +0000

Brain Tuner has a very cute icon and a cute name, but is really nothing more than a timed math test. Suprisingly, a lot of people give it decent reviews on the app store. If the idea of solving 20 third grade arithmetic problems in the least amount of time possible interests you, try it out. If not, move on people, nothing to see here.

app_name: Brain Tuner
rating: 5/10