Brain Bender Puzzles & Activities: Information from Answers.com Mobile

Brain Bender Puzzles & Activities

Platform: IBM PC Compatible
Release Date: December 14, 1999
Genre: Puzzle
Style: Action Puzzle
Similar Games: Hello Kitty Puzzle Collection (Game Boy Color), Rubik's Games (IBM PC Compatible), Nick Click: Digital Camera & CD-ROM (IBM PC Compatible), Galaxy of Brain Games (IBM PC Compatible), Nick-O-Matic Design Factory (IBM PC Compatible)

Game Description

Now kids can give their brains a work-out and have fun with some of their favorite Nickelodeon cartoon characters along the way in Brain Bender Puzzles and Activities.

Once you've signed in, you can decide which side of the brain you want to exercise: the left side, which is used for logic and analysis, or the right side, which is used for creating and imagining. You can customize your games by choosing which backgrounds, sounds, Nickelodeon characters and difficulty level you want as you play.

If you opt for the left side, you can check out ToonTiles, a brainteaser in which you use memory and strategy to clear all the character tiles off the board. Or perhaps you'd like to throw some splat around in SplatHurl, where you need to figure out which combination of colors and characters is necessary to predict where the splat will land.

In ToonMaze, the goal is to get out of the maze by using the code contained in the light bulb, and in Nickinos, you can print out your own customized tiles and create a brand new game to play alone or with your friends.

Over in the right side of the brain, you get to have a little fun and flex those creativity muscles. In DancingToons, you set the scene, pick a character, choose the music and create your own choreography for some crazy dance routines. In ToonDraw, you can print out instructions for drawing your favorite Nick characters or watch videos of some of the animators and designers as they explain how they do their jobs.

Once you've learned how to draw the characters, you'll probably want to make your own cartoons, which is where ToonMaker comes in. While they're not actually videos, you can create scenes with the characters and put the words in their mouths.

The final right brain game, MadLobes, is a take-off on the popular Mad Libs books of yesteryear. Answer a series of questions and then watch as the computer places them into a silly story, complete with illustrations.

If you want to share the fun you've had with a friend, look out for the mailbox icon on some of the games. You can save your activities on your desktop and mail them to your pals as attachments to your e-mails. They'll be able to look at your creations without needing to have a copy of the Brain Bender CD-ROM in their computer.

~ Brad Cook, All Game Guide

Roots & Influences

This collection of puzzles uses characters from various cartoons which air regularly on the cable channel Nickelodeon such as Hey Arnold, Cat Dog and Rugrats.

~ Brad Cook, All Game Guide

Review: Overall

Brain Bender Puzzles & Activities is a collection of eight mini-games featuring Nickelodeon's most popular characters including the Rugrats, Angry Beavers and Ren and Stimpy among others. The look and feel is consistent with the source material: weird graphics in mismatched colors, fairly ugly characters, highly repetitive music and kid-based humor featuring gross-out sound effects. As an example, one of the game's interface screens features a deep-blue, pulsating jelly brain plastered over a wavy background pattern in sickly lime green and white -- exactly what kids love and parents love to hate.

Obviously, the game's designers know their hyperactive, fast-and-furious audience. Most of the activities can be played in two minutes or less. If the player sits idle for more than 30 seconds, a PA announcer taunts him or her with an annoying comment like: "If you're just gonna sit there and sleep, don't drool on the keyboard, that's all I ask." The interface is cluttered with buttons with non-intuitive purposes. In fact, the best way to discover that the mad-scientist lever should be pulled to randomize a puzzle or the TV screen gives access to a customizing menu is to click everywhere and see what happens.

The best of the game's features is definitely the "E-candy," which allows kids to e-mail their own customized puzzles and creations to friends who can view and play them even if they don't own the game. This is a clever marketing ploy, which undoubtedly boosts the game's replay value.

The online help feature is problematic. Curiously enough, its voice-overs do not match the text printed on screen, which is very distracting. Also, clicking on the help button always brings up a generic and imprecise explanation of the game's interface first, while the rules of the activity being played are relegated to a second page. However, since the activities are so simple, the help function is not needed for long.

Unfortunately, some of the short activities provide little incentive to return once the basic tenet has been discovered. Toon Maze, in which the player must follow a path described by a sequence of character faces, is too easy for the game's target age group (8 and up). So, too, is Splat Hurl, where the player must discover which row in a 5x5 grid is associated with which color, which character is associated with which column and then splat the appropriate character-color combination into the grid to score points. Nickinos consists of printing paper dominoes to play offline. Besides the funny audio-visuals, there is no replay value to any of them.

On the other end of the scale, Toon Draw provides players minimal printed instructions to draw their favorite characters on paper and seems much too difficult for 8-10 year olds. Dancing Toons, Toon Maker and Mad Lobes will, however, keep kids coming back for a while. Assembling cartoon choreographs, taking funny snapshots and creating fill-in-the-blank stories that can be e-mailed to friends is an easy and rewarding experience, enhanced by the component libraries which are large enough to keep things fresh for several hours.

Overall, the game is a bit short and replay value and some of the activities may miss the mark when it comes to the target audience group but it's still an effective product.