Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1130 in Software
• Brand: Mindscape
• Released on: 2006-09-15
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description:
First came Sudoku, the fiendishly addictive puzzle, and now Britain is about to be hit by another Japanese craze: the 10-minute mental work out. Mindscape's Brain Trainer will be the first PC game to bring brain training to office workers, laptop commuters and home PC users. This new game lets you have fun while improving your brain power and can help enhance your performance when it comes to everyday tasks. You can play a daily range of activities and review your progress in order to see whether or not you can improve your memory, concentration and logic skills. You'll never get bored as this game comes with an infinite number of questions.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Good fun!
This is a simple program, which, as the name suggests, helps to train your brain in various skills, including logic, numeracy, literacy, spacial and memory. There are three different types of task to each skill.

The main feature is the daily workout, which takes about 10 minutes, and involves doing a pre-detemined task from each skill. This is scored on speed and accuracy, and as you get better scores, the difficulty level increases. There is a progress report, where your scores are added to a rolling graph, and it is encouraging to see scores improving (I've done about two weeks worth now, and definite upward trend, albeit with a few hopeless dips!)

Apart from the daily workout, you can practice all the different tasks, which come in five levels.

This is a simple, but fun program, which is likely to have some enduring entertainment value. It's a little like doing the morning crossword / sudoku. At the price, it will be a good Christmas present this year.

One Proviso
This is a reasonable product and quite fun - but not for Einsteins. There is one rather horrid little annoyance (I think) to this PC version, viz., you are forced to "register" before you can install; I assume this is for copyright reasons, which is fair enough. HOWEVER, I found their server down when trying to submit the registration, so I was stuffed for some time. Furthermore, I was asked for some personal detail which I found unnecessarily intrusive and obviously for market research rather than security......

Shoddy product
I bought this in the hope that it would test me a bit, help me develop my mental arithmetic and give me some idea of how to train my mind.
Over all, the application looks and sounds a bit like you're running it on a handheld device you might pick up at a £1 shop. There is very little instruction, although it is all so basic that you don't really need it. There's nothing that gives you any idea of what level you should be aiming for, or how well you're doing - other than against yourself. Even then the scoring system doesn't seem to mean much.
What really shocked me about this product were the bugs/quirks, these are the ones I've found so far (having used this for two days):
1) The mathematical equations take no account of operator precedence and are always evaluated left to right, so 3 + 8 * 5 apparently equals 55 ((3 + 8) * 5), not 43 (3 + (8 * 5)). Not a good habit to get into.
2) On one 'daily test' I was given a spelling question, the question asked which version of the word was spelt correctly, but I was given no options to select. Oddly enough I didn't manage to score at all with that one.
3) There really is a reading test that just asks you to click 'done' when you've finished reading. How well am I supposed to understand the text? Would a few questions about what I'd read be asking too much?

In conclusion, this really looks as if it could have been developed by a class of primary school children. Don't waste your money, read a book and do some sums in your head instead... or just go online and put the term 'IQ test' in a search engine, you'll get it all for free.