Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day

October 23,2007 - With the astounding amount of success the various Brain training games like Big Brain Academy, Brain Age, and Brain Age 2, Nintendo's goal to expand their gaming audience has been working like a charm. Nintendo has gotten people into believing that games are indeed making them smarter, but is there anything else such games can improve? Nintendo believes so, and they've gotten Namco Bandai to help out with a new game called Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day.

Flash Focus essentially has the same premise as its Brain Age cousin, except this time, you're training your vision. Upon first booting the game, information about how your eyes work is fed to you and a long, yet very entertaining tutorial follows. Here, you try out some of the core games including Box Track, Number Flash, Symbol Order, Middle Match, and Box Tap. Each of these five games trains a certain aspect of your vision. The abilities of your eyesight are divided into five categories: Dynamic Visual Acuity, Momentary Vision, Eye Movement, Peripheral Vision, and Hand-Eye Coordination.

After getting through with the tutorial and trying out the default core games, the option of Daily Training opens up. With Daily Training, you have options such as Today's Recommended Training along with Custom Training. Today's Recommended Training is accessible after you calculate your Eye Age for the day, and it makes you play the minigames with a focal point on the aspect of your eyesight that the game believes you should improve on.

The goal you want to achieve every day is to improve your Eye Age. Like the Brain Age games, the best possible age is 20, and the only way to achieve such an eye age would be to perform extremely well in each of the five random games assigned to you. The odds are you won't be able to achieve a perfect eye age of 20 in your first try, so that's why Custom Training is there. You can play any minigame you want, including sports minigames such as Baseball and Boxing. In Baseball, you're the batter making an attempt to hit the ball with the stylus. The pitcher will often throw tricky balls at you, and you have to hit the ball perfectly for a better score. In Boxing, you're up against a sparring partner. All you have to do is punch the targets cleanly in the center--hitting anywhere else leads to a lower score. You can also dodge by dragging the stylus at the appropriate time when the arrow is flashing. When you achieve the highest ranking in any of the games you play in Custom Training, you unlock a harder difficulty, which provide an even greater challenge.

When completing a game every day, you get a stamp for the respective day you play on your calendar. The more stamps you get, the more options you unlock. This obviously gives you an alternative incentive to play the game, other than to just train your eyesight.

After you're done for the day, one of the more intriguing things about the game is the Eye Relaxation feature. It's not required for you to do at all, but the exercises it makes you do like rotating your eyes and neck, blinking a number of times, and glaring at one place to another are definitely some very relaxing exercises. Reading about it here doesn't offer much; it's something you have to try.

The game is definitely easy on the eyes. The interface is more user-friendly than other touch games in this genre, and the simplicity just makes the game a whole lot more approachable than anything else you'll find available on the DS. The active sports minigames in Flash Focus are built on simple sprites as well as small pictures, which seem to add realism in a very simplistic fashion. Flash Focus isn't flashy, but it gets the job done in the visual department.

There really isn't much to say about the sound. The words spoken by the Eye Relaxation narrator are very subtle, while the rest of the sounds are clichéd sound effects. Either way, if the game was to be rated based on its sound, there wouldn't be a reason to even have the title reviewed.

With the plethora of options waiting to be uncovered after every passing day, it's hard to not enjoy playing Flash Focus. The game offers the player a lot, and at the same time, limits what can be done day by day. With the various minigames to be played, along with the fact that you can only do so much to improve every day, it's safe to say that Flash Focus does indeed make your vision better. Not only that, but the minigames are extremely fun and aren't as nitpicky as the ones in Brain Age. If you want a game that's simple to play that can be played at any time, Flash Focus is the game for you. At the extremely low price of $19.95, don't think of it as an alternative to your Brain games. Flash Focus is the perfect supplement.

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