My Word Coach DS Review

I bought this the other day for DS. It's pretty cool as far as that whole "brain training" genre goes. This one is focused on building your vocabulary and to some extent, it works. I'm learning new words everyday.

The game runs very much like Brain Training. The idea is that you play a few games every day and it measures your competance at the games in some sort of scale where you can try and reach the top. It fails on a few levels.

Firstly, there way of helping you to learn these new words is by telling you what their definition is. The problem is that Dictionary definitions are often hard to grasp. What they need to do is put the words in some sort of context too. This would certainly help get the gist of how to use the word rather than just knowing what it means. When I was growing up, hell, even now, I use words in the wrong way or the wrong context because I "kind-of" know what it means but don't quite get it right or say it in the wrong way. This is a process of learning. It's only after someone picks you up on this, corrects you, that you learn what's really going on.

Another problem is that the character recognition is a bit off. The way I do an E is apparently not accepted. There were similar, but not as frequent, problems on Brain Training. The good thing is that it gives you ample time to correct it if it gets it wrong. Some of the games aren't as smooth or as well designed as Brain Training and this is something that is quite important to get right. The games in Brain Training were not the best of fun but they suited a purpose whereas there are times with the Word Coach that you wonder why you are doing this. There are no games that require much speed as they all involve reading definitions of words; this is not necessarily a bad thing but I often feel like I should be doing the games at speed when that sometimes works against me.

All in all, it's not a bad game and I hope it fits the purpose of teaching me new words and improving my speaking and writing but I feel like if this game were actually made by the same developers as Brain Training, it would be better.

75%

Where's the multiplayer gone?

I've had a little bit of a revelation recently. I had a few mates round for a bit of a lads night, beer and Xbox, like old times. I was reminiscing back to days of Mario Kart and Golden Eye, four player madness, laughing like never before and frantic shouts, basically getting carried away. These memories are my fondest of gaming. I hadn't had a night like that in ages so I arranged it. There have been a lot of good games out on the 360 lately; Call of Duty 4, Skate, PGR4, all of which I had really enjoyed online (except for Skate, EA can't seem to do online justice) and I was really looking forward to taking a few mates to school. Here's where the disappointment came in. Game developers don't care about offline multiplayer any more.

All three games have severely stripped down versions of the online multiplayer for offline play. CoD4 has allowed you only to choose its pre-set classes, has fewer of the game modes and fewer maps. The classes do not have all of the perks and not all of the weapons. You cannot custom make your own classes. This is very disappointing. The game was still amazing fun, and I really cannot slate the game apart from this (see my review).

Skate, on the other hand, only allows players to play the type of games where you take it in turns. This, to be honest, is fucking shoddy! Their choice to do this might have been to do with not wanting to split the screens but I was really hoping to have competitions of "best trick" or freeskate and such. On the other hand I'm brought modes like "Spot battle" and "S-K-A-T-E". These modes are tedious as they need players to take it in turns. While appreciating your mates tricks is probably the idea, it can incredibly tedious. I certainly wish there could be death races or spot battles, some of the stuff that's on the online multiplayer.

PGR is the worst offender. I don't particularly like the game, I don't like racing games really, but I thought racing against mates would be fun... if I was actually allowed. The game only allows for two players to race against each other. This is SHIT! I'm sorry but when four controllers can be connected to an Xbox and you can probably have 8 players in a race, why the FUCK can't we play four player? This is just fucking stupid!

Anyway, I was very disappointed. I hate being disappointed. I know that it must be difficult for game devs to make a complete game in little time these days. There's the extra side to gaming these days, online gaming, which must take a lot more programming than before. I understand that this must make the work load double but these are just excuses to me because in my opinion they have taken a half arsed approach to one essential part of any game.

There's another thing. Wii has no problem making great offline multiplayer games, in fact, some may argue that all it has is great party games but for some reason it can't seem to get the online right. Is this the choice I'm going to have to put up with in future, one or the other? It makes me feel quite annoyed that I may never be able to play Warioware offline or that I might never play Skate with mates in a way that it was meant to be played.

Maybe I'm being silly. Maybe I should get with the times. Maybe I should just realise the facts that I have argued here. I just can't help but feel slightly cheated.