Encleverment Experiment

The ‘Encleverment Experiment’ is very much a fun, and colourful ‘Brain Training’ type game on XBLA. You have a very nice Professor, called Professor Ivor, who my mum really liked and compared him to the guy who was the narrator on the 70s children’s television show Bagpuss. You can play as your Xbox Live avatar and you get given a little cute mascot (my bear mascot is now wearing an ickle American Football kit) and he looks after the scores for you and you can collect around 60 different types of mascot by earning ‘noodles’ (the supposed currency of geniuses) whilst playing the game, but by also playing and winning certain tests.

The single player game lets you take a test, which is called strangely enough, ‘Take a Test’ mode, which you should probably do once a day, and after taking the test you get given a little graph showing how your brain is improving on certain brain tingling tasks such as memory, recognition, maths and saving cows from the clutches of cattle thieving aliens. For instance, it wasn’t all just bog standard questions, instead it was more like, “how much delicious pie would be left if half of it was cut away and eaten by a rather lucky person?” Then it would give you 4 possible answers and each coloured button on your Xbox controller corresponds to different sized pie pieces, you then just press the button you think is the right answer.

I would recommend starting off on at least normal difficulty, as myself and it seems Ready Up’s Jake found out the hard way, on how to successfully melt your mind in a matter of seconds on ‘Enclevered’ difficulty. Along with this, you can also opt to do all the tests in one go and prove your awesomeness. You also have the option for ‘Gameshow’ mode which is when you play the tests with an AI character. This is good fun but the AI character can sometimes have the reactions of a ninja falcon on speed and can often make you cry.

If you don’t want to cry at the hands of the the AI, then do it in front of your friends and family as this mode is also used in the local and online multiplayer games. It really is a whole different experience in a local multiplayer match, and when you’re playing with my family it can often come with threats leading to your demise under a patio. Of course my family are actually lovely and not at all homicidal maniacs and we managed to enjoy several rounds without killing each other. Though it can get very tense on the last test as it’s the ‘Score Stealer Game’, so if you  get an answer right, you get to steal points off your opponents. This caused a stir due to the fact my mum was winning and it was down to a 100 point lead, which my dad then stole from her causing him to be the victor in the last moments. My mother was not pleased…

You can even make your own game show using the ‘Home-Made Game’ editor where you create up to 30 rounds of pain and brain destruction for your friends and family (probably won’t be trying that idea against my mum, as I know I’ll pay for it later).

So it doesn’t matter if you are a teacher, hairdresser, designer or work for a telecommunications firm we all had the same enjoyment as it was challenging but most of all fun at the same time, and it never ever made you feel dumb… until you put the difficulty up to ‘Enclevered’ anyway and then no one is safe.