Current mood:	exanimate
Current music:	Thomas Fehlmann "Streets of blah"

Machigai Museum
This weekend my wife has been mostly addicted to Dr.Mario and I have been mostly playing [eM] eNCHANT arM and Zuma. The new DS right brain game, Machigai Museum, got a bit of a look in too, but it's not much to talk about - just an interactive puzzle game. I wrote some impressions so I'll just c&p here:

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Unou no Tatsujin - Soukai! Machigai Museum

The game is basically an electronic spot-the-difference game. The main game is played against the clock, with 10 seconds to find each difference in a number of screens. Each level has 10 stages and the final stage ends with a boss, which introduces a new gameplay element into the mix, e.g. you have to scratch off the covering of the picture before spotting the difference, or the picture is animated and you have to find the animated difference. There's flipped pictures, and also a variation where you have to choose one of a number of parts that isn't part of the example model (like airfix). You can see many of the variations here.

The premise, of course, is that repeatedly doing this will exercise the right side of your brain. The game keeps constant check on how you are developing your brain, through a set of statistics for different types of recognition. There's also a daily fortune telling part which will give you a reading based on the differences you choose in a number of pictures.

It's simple, fast and quite good fun. What's surprising is that it's difficult to put down once you start playing. My wife enjoys it too, and would probably play it more if she weren't addicted to the Dr.Mario part of Brain Training... The music and illustrations are made by Namco All Stars. If you've played any Namco games, there'll be plenty of references you'll get, like Mappy, Ridge Racer, Sky Kid, Mr.Driller, Katamari Damacy, Pac-Pix etc. There's plenty of non-game images too, examples here. The music is the same - some game references, and some Namco takes on other tunes.

It's not a full price game, but it's not as cheap as Nintendo's Brain Training titles either. I can't help but wish they'd put next week's "Kono Quiz Yarou" on the same cart, but that's Namco for you. I don't know how many levels/stages there are, but the box says there's over 10,000 puzzles (not necessarily unique pictures, I must stress). If you are at all self-conscious about playing simple games, give this a miss, but if you like a quick buzz that may actually be beneficial to your brain too (according to some dude in some Japanese university), then by all means, pick it up.

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My [eM] progress counter reads 40% and I've just hit a pretty solid boss fight. I've lost twice already, but it should be doable tonight with slightly improved tactics. I figured the voice acting was pretty preposterous before, but my wife was actually laughing out loud with the stupidity of some of the lines. It does seem like a bit of a joke now, especially combined with some of the characters which are blatant parodies of other RPGs. It's a shame as the product is quite well polished and if it took itself seriously it would be a better game, I feel.