Brainiversity: Make Your Mind Brighter
Company: Brighter Minds
Adding to the growing Brain Train genre that was rocketed to the forefront of everyone's minds with Brain Age, Brainiversity will be an all new PC-based experience that will allow you to test yourself on a daily basis and increase your mental capabilities in the areas of math, memory, language and analysis. Brainiversity is a straightforward application that will give you several options when you first boot it up. You will be able to either take your Daily Exam, go through Practice (which lets you focus on specific games that you have already gone through) or view your Report Card.
Brainiversity's Daily Exam is the heart of this program. Here you will be given random games from each of the four categories. Each test starts off simple, but as the time ticks away, each question gets harder and harder. One set of questions will display faces and names, on the next screen, it will show you a face and you have to select the correct name. At first, this is easy because it starts with just one face, but as you get more and more answered, more and more faces appear on the question screen. Another test will show you a series of words in different colors. You will be asked various questions about the words like how many red T's are there, or simply how many T's. I found the math questions to be a bit easier, but I think that is a personal slant, not anything against this game. One of the math tests shows you various grids of numbers and asks you a question about each one. These questions range from sum up a column to how many numbers on the screen are less than 6, or divisible by 6 or other questions of the same style.
Probably one of the harder tests that I found Brainiversity had was the "Shopping List" one. Here you are given a screen full of items. You have a set time to try and memorize as many of the items as possible. Then you go to a screen with a text box. The goal is to type in as many of the items on the previous screen as you can remember before the clock counts down. But the best part about this program was that I found myself doing better each time I tried it over the course of the time I had this preview. At the end of your Daily Test, you are then presented with a graph of your scores and how they have changed across the different days. This is a really good visual tool that helps to show exactly how this program is helping you.
The Practice section is just what it sounds like, it will display each of the tests that you have unlocked so far and let you go through them again in order to better exercise that particular aspect of your brain, while the Report Card section of Brainiversity is where you will go to see how you've progressed overall and see what awards you've won. Brainiversity is another example of a game that can really help you out since it will keep your mind sharp. While the individual tests are simple alone, when combined with the others and when given to you in quick succession with a time limit on most of them, they become a serious mental workout. Look for Brainiversity to come out in May of this year.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
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