11. A game with vision: Sight Training

Sight Training comes from an interesting time in Nintendo's history. They were riding high on the DS sales, and after the phenomenal success of snake oil on a cartridge, also known as Brain Training, they were desperately cranking out as much similar software as they could as quickly as possible. Presumably this was to make sales before people realised that Brain Training only made you better at the specific minigames it asked you to play. The "Touch! Generations" series of games for the Nintendo DS was created to sell games to this new audience.

Sigh Training is also from the time where Nintendo renamed their games across regions, even for those who spoke the same language. So while the game goes by "Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes" in PAL regions, yet in the US it was " Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day". How needlessly confusing! And really weird when even back in 2008, the majority of video game news came from international websites. Nintendo continued with this nonsense until even the 3DS and WiiU, where for instance the rhythm heaven games go by different names in different regions.

I want to stress that this is one of the games I never bought with the intent of actually playing. Much like many of the games I've played so far, this came with a cache of games that had some pretty good games as well as some uh... this.

Sight Training is intended to be played in short bursts every day. As such, rather than play 1 hour straight, I split my time across 2 days.

As someone who has pretty poor vision, being both short sighted and with a mild astigmatism in one eye, the idea of a game that could improve my vision is very appealing! Oh wait, what is this disclaimer on the back of the box...

Well, alright then.

Sight Training is an extremely simple game. Through a series of minigames, 5 aspects of vision are tested: Momentary Vision, Hand-Eye Co-ordination, Peripheral Vision, Eye Movement and Dynamic Visual Accuity. Every day, you'll do 5 minigames which teach each, and are then presented with an "eye age".

These minigames are very simple in both gameplay and presentation. Nowhere near the visual delight and creativity of something like Warioware. For instance, the Dynamic Visual Acuity test is an incredibly basic shuffling game where you need to keep your eye on a specific box as it is shuffled around faster and faster, which can be seen in this incredibly low resolution advertisement from 2007.

Ironically, the times I have walked into a pole have been BECAUSE I was focused on a portable console

All the games are as simple as this, and feel more like a sight test than anything else. Which i suppose is the point! But isn't very fun! They are at least responsive, which is certainly an improvement over most of the DS games this experiment has had me play so far.

My first 5 games played, I was presented with my eye age, and surprisingly it lined up with my actual age. On the following day, far more rested and more familiar with how the game works, my eye age was... slightly worse!

At least my actual age is also my early 40s

With only an hour under my belt, I can't really speak to if this game actually can help strengthen those 5 visual abilities. It would take a few weeks of daily play to fairly judge that, and that is something I simply don't want to do. Because it would be boring.

So in conclusion, I should have just watched an hour of Brendaniel videos. Far better use of my time.

He's right, Night 45 is very cool

Next: finally, a game from the bundle that is definately good: Super Princess Peach.