GamesRelay

Name: Buzz! Brain Bender

With the recent popularity of Dr Kawashima’s Brain games for the Nintendo DS it should come as no surprise that Sony want a piece of the brain training games pie for the PlayStation Portable, and so Buzz! Brain Bender is born which is also known as Buzz! Master Quiz in North America. The game is Sony’s first endeavour into a genre made most popular by the DS, and using their popular game show host Buzz to present Brain Bender gives it an equally fun feel to a game which is not only supposed to be fun, but also to challenge your brain.

Brain Bender doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table, of course the game is different, but in reality the practice is still the same. The game features a series of puzzles which as the creators of the game state; "will help improve your mental agility," if it can do that, then it should be a winner. So the game includes sixteen puzzles to challenge your brain which are split over four different categories that test your observation, your memory, your analysis and your mathematical skills. The sixteen puzzles are mostly made up of multiple choice questions with four answers to choose from, the puzzle is timed so you need to think fast once the question is presented, thankfully the controls are easy to use and to answer a question is simply a case of tapping one of the PSP’s face buttons.

The puzzles which you have to play through involve figuring out equations, pattern recognition, speed counting and path finding just to name a few, these are quite challenging, one fun puzzle being the path finding which see’s you working out the route through a maze. However, the main drawback being, they can only last so long before they start to become repetitive, though you can scale the difficulty, and in fact this is one of the main problems. Where the game is supposed to improve your mental agility by making you work out the puzzles, you actually find yourself getting better at the questions and puzzles themselves thus not improving your brains agility at all. Of course, the game will have some sort of effect, but hardly noticeable in your everyday life.

On top of the puzzles, the game allows you to take a test to see just how powerful your brain really is, you take the test which is based over four random challenges, once completed the game tallies your performance into an overall score and then compares your results with a piece of electrical equipment such as a toaster. While it’s certainly a weird analogy to use as reference to your brain, it’s effective (let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to be more intelligent than a toaster?) One of the main problems however is the ability to test yourself as many times as you like each day, which negates the point of actually playing for a prolonged period of weeks to see if the game does have an improvement on your brain or not. While it shouldn't be referenced to the Brain Training games on the DS, they do only allow you to test yourself once per day.

Of course Brain Bender will not work over night, the same can be said about all the brain exercising games currently available, while the puzzles are challenging, the hardest challenge is actually sticking to playing the game when you’re supposed to, which is usually once a day, and so improving your mental agility over time.

Buzz! Brain Bender does include achievements which you can work towards unlocking adding some replay value to the game, these aren’t to be mistaken for PlayStation Trophies however, since the PlayStation Portable has yet to have them included. There are also challenge levels which you unlock through playing which mainly incorporate different variations on the existing puzzles, such as trying to answer as many questions correctly in a four-minute challenge, these do repeat questions you will have already seen though, so with practice you can answer them relatively easily without much thought.

Brain Bender does a fairly decent job of bringing the brain exercise genre to the PSP but it doesn’t really distinguish itself from any of the other games on different platforms. The game shouldn’t be approached from the perspective of trying to improve your mental agility however, it’s a fun game which should be great for players of puzzle games who like a challenge, though if you do want to give your brain a mental workout, you really need to stick at the game every day and only do the test once per day to see if their has been any improvement over the course of time, that’s the hardest challenge you'll have.