In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life, and this week we have: Brainiversity

Ever since Nintendo’s Brain Age was released, companies have been trying to come up with their own versions, creating games with educational themes, claiming they can help judge your intelligence and help improve your different mental capabilities as well. We’ve seen the original on the Nintendo DS, we’ve seen different games on the PSP, and it was only natural that eventually we’d stumble across the PC equivalent. Whether these games actually help with what they say or not, if you’re interested in quick puzzlers to test yourself and possibly improve yourself as well, Brainiversity might be a game you’d be interested in. Of course that’s one very big “might.”

Like most games of this genre, Brainiversity is all about the daily exams to test yourself with the ability to practice the different games that make up the test as well. You’ll have to complete a handful of tests, all covering different topics, and in theory they do seem tied into different specialties, with some focusing on language, some on mathematics, and some on recognition and memorization as well. Once all the tests are done the game will then give you a score and plot your progress on a chart. After you’ve completed the test, you turn the game off, come back the next day, go through the whole process again, and then compare your new progress to your old to see how you’ve improved. I’d be more inclined to believe the results, but all my scores have ranged in the high 70 range with my top being 81, and I swear I’m smarter than that.

The game does have a variety of different challenges, but since the game picks your daily test challenges at random you could go two days in a row playing some of the same challenges, and especially ones you don’t particularly like. The typical challenges include being given a starting letter and ending letter and having to create at least a five letter word out of them; viewing a mathematical problem and deciding whether it’s missing an addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division symbol; clicking on the words in alphabetical order; answering questions based on the numbers or colored letters and words presented; remembering phone numbers; remembering the names associated with faces; and trying to pick a face out of a crowd of other faces. The game has a bunch of different challenges, but they aren’t really all that fun; doing the challenges feels like brushing or flossing your teeth – you might not want to do it, but you know you need to do so.

The game, as said, does indeed have a practice mode (since it would have to have something else since you can only ever play the challenge mode once a day), but until you’ve spent a week or two with the game, you won’t be able to practice all the games and will instead be rather limited for a time; until you’ve actually played the challenge in your daily exam you can’t practice the test in your off-time.

In terms of technical benchmarks, Brainiversity is way down on the totem pole of good looking games, because to be frank, the game is beyond simple looking. Most of the time the game looks like letters and numbers or hand drawn faces on digital sheets on notebook paper, but none of it looks very polished. The letters and numbers look like something I could do in a Word document, while the faces and most of the art looks like it was drawn by a high school student who has taken an art class. Meanwhile, in terms of audio, you are looking at a little tune that plays lightly in the background during the menus, the ticking of a clock, and the chime or buzz of a right or wrong answer.

Like most games in this brain testing genre, as long as you use the game only once a day as it’s intended, you might get some enjoyment out of the game, and it technically does what it seeks to do. However, if you’re looking for something to keep your attention for hours at a time or a casual game just to play and waste a few minutes with, you’re better off looking at other casual games out there.

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