My Word Coach (DS), first impressions

filed under Gaming/PC by in5ane on December 30th, 2007 [blogs index]

In line with previous years, I've scoured the net for post-Christmas sales, not found what I was looking for, then bought the games full-price anyway. The game I failed to save any money on this year was My Word Coach. I'm often stuck for that one word that succinctly describes my point, and I like the Brain Training games, so My Word Coach seemed a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, the Brain Training games have set something of an unofficial precedent that every other 'self help' DS game painfully apes, and My Word Coach is no exception. From the long, boring introduction by the game's mascot, to the idea that one metric can describe your progress, this follows the standard 'training' DS formula.

The game consists of short mini-games, each one meant to help you increase your vocabulary in a different way. They all follow two core themes of spelling words correctly or matching definitions. My Word Coach also follows Brain Training in that it holds back the mini-games until you've reached certain points, but more of that later.

The games themselves are pretty uninspired, inconsistent and prone to being laborious to play simply because of the way the DS controls have been shoehorned into the gameplay. Games often have awkward controls or interfaces that only slow down the timed rounds, as well make the game more 'challenging' by obfuscation.

To regulate your learning, you have a daily target of new words to learn, which can take quite a while to complete, especially early on when you've only got a few games to play. This leads to a lot of unnecessary repetition. Only correct words get counted; there is no concept of a score, and how badly you do is not taken into account. And meeting your daily quota simply increases your 'expression potential' by 1%. The game initially gave me a rating of 50%, so I guess in 50 more days I will be a total guru of the English language. Yay!

The educational content of the games themselves is minimal, and usually a good guess will see you through most rounds. The meat of the 'coaching' comes from after you've played the games, where you can review the words you've encountered, along with a short definition. This can be very easily skipped, but I'm trying not to so I can 'increase my vocabulary' as the game promises. However, even reviewing the post-game list is not ideal, as no examples of how the word may be used within a sentence, nor how to pronounce the words, are offered.

I'm not convinced this is the best way to learn new words at all, and it adds to my feeling that this game took a database of words and tacked on top some very simple games. The whole thing seems rushed and poorly executed, without a thought on how this would actually help anyone.

I will persevere with My Word Coach for the simple fact I do want to learn a few new words, and I've already wasted my money on it. Reading a few more novels and playing some free flash word games probably would have the same desired effect.

Once again, a third party has failed to emulate the success of a DS genre because quite simply they can't reach the high standard of Nintendo.

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