GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 12/18/2008
- Released on: 11/28/2008
- Originally published on GameSpot: Buzz! Brain Bender (PSP) Review
Sony's jumping on late to the brain-exercising bandwagon with Buzz Brain Bender for the PSP, its first stab at the genre made popular by the ever-smiling Dr Kawashima on the Nintendo DS. Brain Bender doesn't tread any new ground, but it does feature a series of well-presented puzzles with adjustable difficulties that should present a challenge for most craniums. It won't make you any smarter, but it can be a fun and interesting distraction.
Buzz is as annoying as ever in this game.
Like its peers, Brain Bender features a series of puzzles that its creators say can help improve your mental agility (but in all likeliness it will probably just improve your skills at performing the puzzles contained within the game). In this case, the 16 included puzzles are broken up into four categories that test your observation, memory, analysis, and mathematical skills. All of the puzzles are presented in a multiple-choice format, with up to four possible answers to a problem mapped to the PSP's face buttons. You're scored on how many questions you get right after a set time limit, with the game charting your progress with each match.
Like other games in this genre, Brain Bender challenges you to improve your mental might over time. In addition to doing the individual puzzles, you can take a test that is made up of four random challenges that are then tallied into an overall score. From this, the game compares your results to a piece of electrical equipment (such as a toaster or remote-controlled car) in a pretty lame analogy of how much brain power you're pumping out. Unfortunately, the whole raison d'etre of a game like Brain Bender--that is, to test how well your mental agility improves over time--is hamstrung by the fact that it lets you test yourself as many times as you want each day. While other games in the genre limit your testing to once per day (which gives you a good indicator of progress as well as a reason to keep coming back), being able to test at any time devalues the results as, frankly, it doesn't feel as important.
There's some variety to be found in Brain Bender's puzzles, ranging from simple plus/minus equations to more complex pattern-recognition challenges. Some are quite taxing; for example, Shape Count asks you to quickly tally up the number of overlapping squares and triangles in an image, whereas Puzzle Pieces is a visual recognition task in which you have to identify which small jigsaw piece belongs in a larger image. Even if you fancy yourself as something of a mental maestro, Brain Bender features three difficulty levels for each game, so you should find a decent amount of challenge.
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