Thursday, October 22, 2009

Brain Challenge, Forethought to Buying

I was a big fan of the DS brain training games, they were good fun and it was cool to see how I was progressing, but I don’t have my DS anymore. If you don’t know what the game is, you complete tests and challenges to assess and develop different parts of the brain and given results afterwards. It’s a good way to keep an active mind.

So now I have an iPhone and mobile broadband, why not try to find an alternative to the DS version?

Enter ‘Brain Challenge‘. First thing: this isn’t a review or a slam, these are my ponderings and thoughts on if I should buy the game. I’ve already tried the demo version, and that was surprisingly fun.

Reviews though… I always read reviews. If you search for a review in Google, you’re most likely to find a well read blog or gaming site at the top of the results – they don’t really mention the problems presented by “normal” people though, at least not from what I can see.

The first and foremost problem that I see is that the game crashes a lot and loses data. A huge amount of people have reviewed via the App Store, and there is at least one or two comments per page about the game crashing to the springboard – these complaints seemed to be unanswered too, at least from what I can tell. I’m not sure why it would be crashing for some people and not others… Perhaps some people haven’t updated their Firmware? I’m willing to say ‘Fine, all games crash for at least someone‘, but the fact that the people who it has crashed for aren’t being helped puts me off.

Secondly, I saw two reviews on the app store yesterday that have since been removed (unless I am just going really blind). Both were referring to the scoring system; one was a guy saying that the results you get are pre-programmed and the other being a couple who said the same thing. The first guy didn’t really present any kind of evidence, so I ignored that review. The couple who reviewed said that for a few weeks of both using it, their results had been exactly the same every day. This isn’t evidence set in stone, as I might be a coincidence, or they might have been helping each other, but it still sounds a little weird.

Does anyone else have these problems? Is it worth risking the (admittedly small amount of) money if it’s just going to crash? I’ll probably wait a little while, and if I don’t find any advice within a few days, I’ll give it a go. Taking one for the team! I probably won’t have time tonight, because I want to write about car rental/travel advice on my other blog… But maybe next week, so that hopefully someone will pick this up.

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