Gamescom: Smart As... What, Exactly?

The mid-2000's fascination with games like Sudoku inevitably led to the rise of the " brain-training" genre, a movement pioneered by the most popular title of them all: Brain Age. Countless clones have since hit the market for just about every conceivable platform, and even several years after the movement has died down quite a bit, they're still coming out.

And yes. One is coming to Vita.

It's called Smart As... (with an ellipsis which I will no longer type), an interesting -- albeit limited -- take on the genre. The version I played was a very early build, and the developers are mum on the exact nature of the title. Will Smart As be a cheap PSN-centric download or a retail game? When will it come out? Unfortunately, I don't yet have answers for any of these questions.

What I do know is that Smart As is designed to be played in short bursts, perhaps on your morning commute or before bed at night. There are 20 minigame within Smart As that can be played in various sequences, and since each minigame has multiple stages, there are essentially hundreds of possible mini-levels to play through. I was able to try out a trio of minigames myself, including one that tested my memory, another that forced me to move multiple blocks to various destinations, and a third that had me fiddle with numbers. Each of these exercises was fun, though I could imagine that the experience could get old rather quickly if you overdo it on any one of them.

Smart As follows the theme many Vita titles are following, which is to use the handheld's touch screens and tilt controls in lieu of buttons and analog sticks. So with the block-moving game, for instance, Vita's SixAxis controls will shift the blocks around the screen. As for the numbers and memory exercises, it's all about the front touch screen.

The trio of minigame I attempted were intuitive and easy to understand, though they will be difficult to master. Each puzzle gets harder the further and further you get, so while matching objects in the memory game will be easy at first, it gets more difficult later on. The same goes for the numbers exercise, which asks you to combine digits in various ways in order to achieve sums given on-screen. Difficulty doesn't only scale by how far you get into the game, either. The developers plan on bringing optional difficulty levels into the mix to keep things fresh and interesting.

Smart As will also have social functionality via Vita's GPS-like metagame called Near, as well as on Twitter and Facebook. Leaderboards on Near could be sorted in all sorts of ways, including by territory, friends, and more. Being able to figure out how much smarter you are than others on the leaderboards is a huge part of the game, and a big reason why you'd conceivably come back to get better… hence this title's name.

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