“Exercising your brain has never been this much fun.”
When I wanted to put a decent game on my BlackBerry Bold 9700 a few months back, I wasn’t sure what to go with. I had tried Mega Man 3, but found the controls to be absolutely terrible. This ruled out platformers. I thought for a while about what would work on a keypad based mobile phone. The answer was Brain Challenge.
Brain Challenge consists of practice modes and daily IQ/stress tests that determine how much of your brain you’re using, or how stressed you may be. I don’t consider these tests to be entirely accurate, but it’s fun trying to improve your score day after day.
The tests present you with games that force you to use a wide variety of skills, such as memory, timed reflexes, and mathematics. Some of the games are quite fun, such as the one that makes you select which path a frog will traverse and which point he will end up at. Others are not so fun to me, like the one that has you trying to press a button on your phone the very second that a black outline aligns itself with a shape’s outer perimeter.
The better you do at the games, the harder they will be next time you play them. Over time, I recognized a very significant jump in the difficulty of the memory based games, which the game tells me I am best at.
The controls are great on the BlackBerry Bold. Using the trackball is a real joy, as it is more responsive than any video game controller. I have very rarely made mistakes while playing any of the games in Brain Challenge, though I have been slow to input my answers a few times because the BlackBerry trackball can in fact be very sensitive, but this is not the game’s fault.
Sound is actually quite annoying in Brain Challenge, and I always find myself turning it off to prevent myself from getting a headache. It does sound quite bad, especially the main menu music which I fear not even the composer of it may love.
While it isn’t going to win any awards, Brain Challenge is a great puzzle game to play on the go or when you have a few minutes to kill, and is probably my favourite game that I have on my BlackBerry, beating out The Sims 3 and Guitar Hero 5 Mobile by a very large margin. If puzzle games are your thing and you have a BlackBerry, give this one a shot.
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