Body and Brain Connection

I've had this game for a little under a week now and I've enjoyed it. It's not a game I find myself wanting to play for a long period of time, but then it really isn't designed for that. The premise is that you will complete three exercises every day. You can play any of the exercises whenever you want, but you are recommended to play three specific exercises each day, and the choices change around a bit each day. Whenever you want, you can also take a test that will measure your current brain age to see if your regular exercises are paying off. If I don't choose to play extra exercises, I'm usually done for the day in under 15 minutes.

The games are cute, and they don't bore me, but neither would I consider them riveting. Once I've completed my three exercises, I'm usually ready to move on to something else. Note that I have only played in single player mode. I'm sure competing against somebody else would increase the entertainment factor. However, I don't really consider it a bad thing that I don't spend a ton of time playing the game. I do my daily brain exercises, and then I move on to one of the more physically active Kinect games that I find more entertaining.

I haven't had any real issues with the interface. When navigating menus, if you read the manual, it tells you it will not activate any buttons when your hands are close to your body. You move your hand around to where you want it, then push your hand in front of you a bit further to make the program activate the button. On the one hand, I often find myself forgetting to move my hand further out because the other programs I've played with don't require this. But I quickly realize my error when this happens, and one benefit is that I haven't once accidentally selected the wrong thing like I have in other programs. When playing the exercises, I haven't had any issues at all with the program recognizing my movement exactly the way I expect it to. One thing I particularly like is that, while arrowing through instructions or comments, or while scrolling from left to right through multiple screens of choices, the arrow is activated instantly when you put your hand over it. This makes it faster to read through the material. Other buttons have the typical delay while it fills in the little wheel to give you time to change your mind.

Some reviewers have expressed concern that the comments from the Dr. can be overly harsh when you don't do well on an exercise, and that the difficulty can be high for younger children. I can't speak from a child's perspective as I've only played this myself and I'm in my mid-30's, but I can see where some of the exercises would be difficult for a child. That doesn't mean they can't improve if they practice them. As far as the comments go, I haven't found them to be particularly harsh. Usually I've found I agreed with his comments. On the rare occasions when I received an F on something (I'm horrible at that Pacman game!), the Dr. said something along the lines of "I thought you'd be better at this." And I had to agree with him -- I did too! I guess if negative comments from a video game can hurt your feelings, then that's something to take into account when deciding whether to purchase this. But they don't bother me. Yes, my avatar looks sad when I do poorly. But I don't go around grinning like an idiot when I'm doing poorly at something either, so why should my avatar? She perks back up quickly enough after her short moment of pouting.

I have been playing with this game for about 4 weeks now. At 62, I have been dealing with some cognitive issues for the past half-dozen years, and when I saw this game was released, I decided to buy an xbox 360 with kinect primarily to get this game. I am finding the game to be fun and highly therapeutic. I am thrilled with the progress I have made. In addition to the brain training, I also use it as a diagnostic tool providing some quantitative data to help me assess which nutritional approaches that I have been experimenting with are helpful. I do notice there are a few glitches in the games (that I hope will be fixed in future updates), but I don't feel they significantly detract from the value of the game. I notice that the three Kinect games I own do occasionally receive updates.

I'll start off by telling you to ignore the "professional" reviews from other sites telling you that this game is lackluster. I've been playing this game at least once a day since I've gotten it and I really find it to be a lot of fun and pretty interesting to boot. The only problem I have with it is that sometimes the Kinect controls don't work as well as they should in a game that requires nothing less than spot on precision to solve the truckload of mini games/puzzles that this title offers. 95% of the time you'll be fine but occasionally it just feels a bit more difficult than it should because of the control scheme. That being said, the controls are still pretty responsive, even more so than the early crop of Kinect titles.

This game has something for everyone and I think math junkies will really enjoy this game. I dig the variety of puzzles. Some require you to do things like pop a series of balloons that have numbers on them from lowest to highest while others will have you keeping Pac-Man and the Pooka from "Dig-Dug" away from a pack of ghost monsters which is a lot more difficult than you would think. The setup reminds me a lot of Wii Fit in how you have a calendar to stamp whenever you achieve your requirements and that kind of thing works well for a game of this type. If you let this game's charms take you in, you'll be checking your calendar regularly to see if you can lower your brain age.

Some of the puzzles are a bit unforgiving as well and the game may make some feel, let's face it, pretty stupid when the results are posted up but if you can take this game as a constructive way of bettering your mental reflexes, then I think you'd appreciate the effort that went into it. Multiplayer modes are present as well.