By Brad Cook

“No pain, no gain,” your coach says. You’re back for another workout, but unlike the one that pushed your body to the limit earlier today, you seek to maximize your brain activity this time. Brain Challenge gives you a daily opportunity to do that, with 20 training exercises and six freeform creative games to choose from.

Create your profile, select a coach — Dr. Hurley or Professor Stevens — and launch your first Daily Brain Test. Five mini-games cover Brain Challenge’s main problem-solving areas — Logic, Math, Memory, Visual, and Focus — and evaluate your initial level of brain usage as a way to measure future growth. Your coach then lets you know which games you’ve unlocked, tells you the first rank you’ve achieved, and gives you encouragement for next time.

A Gym For Your Brain

Each time you launch Brain Challenge, you can take another Daily Brain Test or head into the Training Room and work on a specific area. Before each daily exam, your coach introduces a question, typically one involving a science subject, and gives you the answer at the end of the session. When your workout ends, your coach lets you know what percentage of your brain is in use now and details your total scores in all areas of the game.

Your coach also notes your strengths and weaknesses, giving you tips for working out in the Training Room, where you give your noggin a more robust challenge. While the Daily Brain Test offers varying difficulty levels, the Training Room lets you choose easy, medium, or hard activities, with 90 seconds for each one, rather than the 50-second limit used in the shorter daily sessions. It’s a good way to focus on a specific area and push yourself as hard as possible.

At the end of each Daily Brain Test, you unlock more games that are accessible in the Training Room. Over time, Brain Challenge keeps track of your historical scores, including overall play time, your daily progress in each area, which categories you tend to favor, and what percentage of questions you’ve answered correctly, as well as the percentage of answers that came faster or slower than expected. Your coach wants you to choose the right answers as fast as possible, so pay attention to your reaction times.

Post-Workout

You also unlock creative games during your daily workouts; they’re found in the Training Room. When you play them, you’re not restricted by time limits or the stress of coming up with the correct answer. You simply “cool down” from your brain-bending activities with freeform games that engage your mind in new ways.

We all know that mental fitness is just as important as physical improvement, so think of Brain Challenge as a “daily vitamin” that contains all the essentials for developing your mind. Remember the words of your coach: “Keep training to make your brain healthy.”

Brain-Stimulating Games

• Logic: This area challenges you to figure out patterns. For example, in the Balance activity, you’re presented with a series of scales containing different objects and you must deduce which one is the heaviest.
• Math: In addition to arithmetic problems, activities in this area also include such games as Trout Route, which presents you with a grid full of numbers. From the starting position, you must take the calculation presented and figure out the correct route. For example, if your starting position is 20 and the calculation is -4, you should next move to the box that says 16.
• Memory: How well do you retain short-term information? Games in this area include Traveling, which shows you a route and asks you to recreate it.
• Visual: The goal here is to process information and complete a related task as fast as possible. In Mosaic, for example, you must recreate patterns as they’re shown to you.
• Focus: This area is similar to Visual, but you must respond to a fluid situation. For instance, Bouncing Ball presents you with multiple bouncing balls, and you must quickly select the one that’s bouncing the highest.
• Creativity: Unwind with a freeform activity, such as Color Maze, in which brain cell fairies travel through four mazes connected by a bridge. Move the bridge to allow the fairies to cross from one maze to another. When they run into each other, they take on new colors and continue their journey. If the bridge isn’t there when they complete the maze, they disappear and a new one of the same color starts from the beginning.

iPod Games FAQ

Do you have questions regarding any of the iPod games available from the iTunes Store?

Memory Crunches. Try to figure out which tile vanished after the row dropped through the box.

Click to see price.

• Site: Brain Challenge
• Publisher: Apple Inc.
• Developer: Gameloft S.A.
• Genre: Puzzle & Trivia

More iPod Games