Sunday 14 Jun 2009

Did you realize that you can train your sight? I would never have guessed it had Nintendo not released a game centered on that very concept. As it turns out, by doing a few exercises daily you may possibly be able to improve your peripheral vision, or maybe even your ability to track movements and quickly focus, and Nintendo’s Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes (hereafter referred to as Sight Training in the interests of reducing unnecessary verbosity) is here to provide the training you need.

Test your “Eye Age”

Sight Training follows the tried and tested pattern of Nintendo’s other training games – first you do a test to determine your Eye Age, then you do a bunch of exercises each day designed to help you improve this Eye Age. Sight Training’s test consists of five mini-games that test various facets of your vision: dynamic visual acuity, momentary vision, eye movement, peripheral vision and hand-eye coordination. For each of the five mini-games (one from each category), you get five “questions,” and the difficulty is adapted continually based on your previous success in that mini-game and your current success, such that each one you get right makes the next one more difficult, and if you get one wrong the difficulty gets scaled back a notch.

Once the test is over you’re given a score (where an age of 20 is the best), and then you’re assigned a set of four exercises to do. Alternatively you can skip the test and jump straight into the four exercises. If you prefer more control over what exercises you do, you can also choose to do Custom training where you get to pick and choose from the exercises you’ve already unlocked.

The exercises

The exercises are divided between “core” and “sports.” The core exercises are more basic – for instance, in one a bunch of C shapes will appear for a short time on the touch screen along with one full O shape, and once they’ve disappeared you must touch the spot where the O appeared. As you get them right the number of C’s will increase and the length of time they appear for will decrease, making it significantly harder to pick up where the O is. This is an example of a Momentary Vision test. Other tests involve tracking moving blocks around the screen, quickly making matches and so on. They all feel a lot more like work than fun and they also ramp up in difficulty very quickly so a few weeks into your training you won’t be getting that sense of progress any more that is essential to keeping one’s interest in a game.

The sports exercises test a number of vision facets at once, for instance in Volleyball you must spike the ball by tapping the touch screen on the ball when it is in the right area, but you must also watch (using your peripheral vision) the blockers because they will block the ball if you spike when they are in a blocking position. There are six different sports exercises and they tend to be a lot more fun than the core ones, but still err on the side of simplicity. It’s unfortunate that there are not more sports exercises to play and that they don’t have a little more to them – all are well and truly mini-games.

Minutes a day keeps it fresh, for a while

The formula, like the Brain Training games, works because you only play for a few minutes a day. Any longer and you are bound to get bored of the core exercises very quickly, but with only four each day chosen by the software you can easily come back to the game day after day for months. At some point you will reach a plateau where you won’t be improving any more though, and at that point any real gaming incentive to continue falls away. If you consider it actual training then that will keep you returning to it, but as a game there is not enough content to keep it interesting after the first couple months.

The presentation of the game is excellent – the pixilated, 8-bit-style animations when you get your score and ranking after an exercise are great, and the sports games with their digitized photo-like sprites are particularly graphically pleasing. Overall, Sight Training is well polished but simply lacks enough content to keep you interested – a bonus full-featured game based on the various exercises would have gone a long way to increasing the longevity and value of the software, similar to how Sudoku makes the Brain Training games much more compelling because there’s something to do once you get the daily training out of the way.

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Contributor:	Peter

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