Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising & Relaxing your eyes (DS)

Gamecow’s Price	RRP $49.95     Save $4.00 $45.95
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Genre	General
Platform	Nintendo DS
Release Date	17/01/2008
Rated

Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising & Relaxing your eyes (DS) Product Information

The first time users play, they complete a short series of activities to determine their Eye Age. Users train every day to lower their Eye Age and challenge their abilities in the five major categories of Focus Power: Hand-Eye Coordination, Peripheral Vision, Dynamic Visual Acuity, Momentary Vision and Eye Movement. They can get good results from just 15 minutes a day. The challenge is to improve the Eye Age and boost Focus Power through daily training.

Like the Brain Training franchise, Vision Training features a calendar that tracks the days users have completed their training by giving stamps. For playing each day, more activities and sports-based training activities are unlocked. Each time users complete an activity, their results are added to graphs and charts so that they can visually follow their progress.

Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising & Relaxing your eyes (DS) Review

The first myth we should address is the fact that the game does not actually improve the strength of your eyesight. That's right, just like carrots Sight Training will not improve your eyesight, instead, Sight Training is designed to train five visual abilities. The five abilities addressed include dynamic visual acuity, which is the ability to clearly see moving objects. Momentary vision, which is the ability to take in a large amount of information at once. Eye movement, which we hope is self explanatory, peripheral vision, which is the ability to see a wide area and hand-eye co-ordination, which is the ability to quickly and accurately react.

Much like the other Training games, Sight Training is all about daily training. The first thing to do is create a profile, this is done by doing a quick eye age check (ours were in the 30's, which we didn't think was too bad considering a computer screen is permanently attached to us) and then writing your name using the Nintendo DS' stylus. The game can support four profiles at once, so theoretically the whole family could become involved in training their eyes. After writing your name, confirming the date and time, and completing the eye age check the training can begin, well the next day it can begin.

The daily training is worked out according to your eye age. There are several different types of workout and once Sight Training works out a recommendation, you can complete the training in any given order. There are several different exercises in Sight Training and to go through each one would take awhile, but generally they can be divided up into sports and core exercises. Core exercises are things like tapping a certain box or quickly seeing a number and writing down what it was. Sports exercises are sports-themed activities, such as spiking a volleyball or punching (with the stylus...) a boxing glove.

Sight Training is a title that is quite difficult to even classify as a game. While Brain Training and Maths Training were also difficult to classify as games, the puzzles in them were consistently difficult, Sudoku and maths problems can change, the exercises and activities in Sight Training do not. This means that after about ten days of training, most people are likely to just give up because they are so sick of spiking the ball or seeing the numbers flash up. We're sure that those who stick with Sight Training will probably feel rather good about their eyesight, but with less than twenty activities, there is quite a bit of repetition.

So, does it work? We cannot say all of a sudden we were able to see great distances, nor could we drive with our eyes shut going 120 KM's an hour on the West Gate Freeway, but we're pretty sure Sight Training promised neither. Sight Training may or may not have improved the five aspects of focus ability identified earlier in this review, but it did at least make us feel a little more confident about our eyesight, which has surely got to be some kind of accomplishment.

Full review PALGN