Light Lifting for Gamers With Little Time to Spare

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THE villagers were doing fine last week, building houses, farming, making babies, so it was a surprise to come back a day later and find a dozen skeletons in the middle of the village. Although the vegetables were ripe, none had been harvested, so the villagers had starved to death.
The problem was simple: my villagers are morons.
They populate Virtual Villagers, a quirky, low-budget game from Last Day at Work that falls somewhere between the Sims and a pet simulator.
Villagers begins when a group of people are shipwrecked on a small island whose previous inhabitants have left behind a few houses and some mysterious ruins. The player’s job is to guide the villagers. Dropping a villager on a berry bush will make her pick berries; dropping a male villager on a female villager will cause them to kiss and enter a house, after which the female may come out carrying a baby. As time goes by, the villagers also learn to fish and bury their dead.
When you turn off the game, the villagers continue their lives. Return the next day and several years will have passed in the village; some villagers will have died, others will have been born.
There’s not really a lot to do in Villagers; you play the game in 5- or 10-minute increments, checking in on the inhabitants once or twice a day to see how they are faring. Once they learn how to farm and breed, you would expect to be able to leave them alone for weeks at a time. But no one wants a game that asks nothing of the player, so the villagers are just stupid enough to need to be pushed to heal the sick and harvest crops.
The island has mysterious ruins, an immovable boulder and other conundrums that must be solved by making the villagers smarter. In a rather inelegant system, scientist villagers earn tech points that can be used to purchase knowledge, suddenly enabling the villagers to work out previously insoluble challenges.
Villagers is for busy people who can’t sit down and play a game for an hour, but would like to kill time for a few minutes here and there. It is closer to a pet simulator like Nintendogs than an actual game, offering little challenge, but it is interesting to watch the villagers journey from cradle to grave and fun to see the little things they do, like holding a celebratory dance after converting a building into a school.
School might make the villagers a little brainier, but perhaps what they really need is to play Big Brain Academy and Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, two games from Nintendo meant to make you smarter.
Both games are played on Nintendo’s hand-held DS game console. Brain Age is aimed at adults, with graphs that allow you to chart your progress daily and a genial virtual scientist who likes to talk about your prefrontal cortex. Academy, on the other hand, doesn’t mention the prefrontal cortex and contains no history of your brain’s progress, instead simply giving you a score that you can try to beat.
Both games focus on a mix of memorization and calculation. In Brain Age, you have to keep track of how many stick figures enter and leave a house or quickly calculate the hours and minutes between two clocks. In Academy, you state which pile of coins is worth the most or memorize a number sequence. Brain Age uses more features of the DS than Academy; some exercises require you to write answers on the touch screen or speak them into the DS microphone.
I first tried exercising my brain years ago on the Web site My Brain Trainer (http://www.mybraintrainer.com/), which bills itself as a “virtual mental gymnasium.” Nintendo’s games aren’t necessarily more effective, but they are more entertaining; My Brain Trainer is the mental equivalent of weight lifting, dull but good for you, while Nintendo’s games are more like Jazzercise, flashy and engaging.
Like Virtual Villagers, Brain Age is meant to be played only a few minutes a day; the exercises lack enough variety to be played for very long.
Academy’s exercises are more varied and faster paced, following the arcade tradition of becoming harder with each passing second, and this makes it easy to play over and over, trying desperately to prove you’re getting smarter.
I’m not sure whether these games have increased my intelligence. After I played Brain Age for a few months, it told me I had gotten quite smart, but when I started playing Academy it told me I was still dumb, suggesting that the games don’t measure intelligence as much as they measure how well you’ve learned to play the exercises.
Still, I keep playing the brain games, both because they’re kind of fun and because I’m hoping that one day I’ll be smart enough for something like Nancy Drew: Danger by Design, an adventure game that contains some puzzles that are simply beyond me.
This is the 14th Nancy Drew game from Her Interactive, and it does all it can to appeal to its target audience of adolescent girls, giving Nancy a job in Paris with a fashion designer named Minette, a mysterious kook who always wears a white mask and has been receiving threatening notes. To spare its players from complexes about their weight, the game makes Minette a designer of plus-size attire, referred to in the game as clothes for “normal-sized women.” The game is so clearly tailored to girls that I was surprised when one segment involved capturing cockroaches. I thought it was kind of disgusting, but perhaps teenage girls are into bugs nowadays.
The puzzles in Design are a mixed bag. Some are clever, some are easy, and a few are simplistic time wasters in which Nancy must make parfait or paint Mona Lisa by the numbers. But some of the puzzles are more difficult than any I’ve previously encountered in the series. While referring to Nancy’s case notes often helps, there are a few puzzles that are remarkably demanding. To make things even more difficult, some puzzles are timed. One that involves defusing a bomb would be fun if it didn’t have to be solved so quickly, leading to many explosions and much annoyance.
Perhaps the hard puzzles are meant to counterbalance the soft-headed story. The game itself is decent over all, though hardly the best in the series, but the ending is anticlimactic. In a game that requires the player to be so smart, it’s surprising that the designers expect their audience to accept a finale so dumb. Even my villagers, starving to death while sitting next to a verdant garden, know better than that.