The Professor bounces light around in the Sunbeam Savior puzzle.
Ready to do some mental calisthenics? Professor Fizzwizzle is back in the Amazing Brain Train, the latest in Grubby Games’ family-friendly series. You fuel his train with your brain energy, by playing minigames in five categories: spatial, memory, planning, numbers, and search.
If that sounds as exciting as taking the SATs, never fear. The fun, challenging minigames combine bright, colorful, and cartoony characters with music that doesn’t interfere with your thought process. Scores are based on how many answers you get right, plus your speed, number of errors, and how much time passed since your last right answer—which encourages players to not rush their responses.
In Practice Mode, you can try all of the unlocked minigames to your heart’s content, with or without time limits. In Test Mode, you can have a crack at five minigames and get an overall score. But the main mode is Quest. You take a ride on the Brain Train to meet various animals, who give you quests. Your score in each minigame determines how far your train will travel in your quest—solve them to open up new sections of track.
The game keeps high scores for each minigame, and uploads them to the Web so you can see how you stack up against other Amazing Brain Train players. Players can customize the controls for each minigame separately, so that one will use a mouse, another will use one keyboard setup, and a third gets a different keyboard setup. If anything, we could say that this is too much flexibility and might cause confusion.
We also found that, despite the 500MHz CPU requirement, we still had to downgrade some of the special effects to play on a 1.6GHz machine. However, this really didn’t seem to affect the game visually.
The Amazing Brain Train is another Grubby Games winner, and we’re not the only ones who think so—it was named to the PAX 10 list of best independent games this year at the Penny Arcade Expo.
coring encourages players to think through the games. Minigames well balanced for difficulty. Great for kids. PAX 10 winner at Penny Arcade Expo 2008. Universal binary.
It’s hard to find drawbacks to this game. Control flexibility can be a little confusing.
