Games

Reflex action

By Shaun Conlin

Ninja exercises train your brain

Game: Ninja Reflex
Publisher: EA
Platform: Wii
Rating: Everyone
Score: 4.5 out of 5

Until recently, to say that video games help to improve hand-eye coordination was mostly a marketing trick to get parents to allow their kids to play video games.

Now we have Nintendo Wii and its celebrated motion-sensitive controller that requires responsive, modestly coordinated gestures to play their games.

NO KILLING REQUIRED

It follows that Electronic Arts� Ninja Reflex does the best with what it has in their new reflex-training game � and does it rather well.

Ninja Reflex is not an action game of martial artists attacking the unsuspecting, nor is it particularly intense or long-playing. It has more in common with brain-training games.

The game features a collection of exercises that interactively illustrate the finer points of Ninjutsu. It requires participants to have concentrated calm as well as the ability to react precisely, quickly and correctly to given circumstances.

REACTION TIME

Ninja Reflex is engaging and reliably challenging in bits and pieces. There are only six reflex exercises offered, but they�re played with progressive difficulty.

It�s the kind of game you play for 15 minutes a day, grabbing fish from a pond with your hands, snatching flies from the air with chopsticks or hitting watermelons with your

flying nunchaku.

Oddly, there�s only one exercise that has you using the Wii-mote like a sword � first to block an attack, then to follow through with a killing swipe. This makes Ninja Reflex a bit too intense for young kids, the ones who could really benefit from motor-skill drills.

Otherwise, Ninja Reflex is greatly suited to kids, or their parents, or anybody else interested in a challenge that actually uses the Wii-mote like the hand-eye coordinator it�s designed to be.� Cox News Service

	unsuspecting (adj): not aware of danger or of something bad concentrated (adj): showing determination to do something progressive (adj): happening or developing steadily snatch (v): to take hold of something quickly and suddenly swipe (n): an act of hitting somebody by swinging your arm or a weapon