2-4-1 My Hangman & Brain Genius

My Hangman and Brain Genius represent opposite ends of the casual spectrum. The former is a game you can play with a stick in the dust, while the second, a product of the recent vogue for training one's brain, is only possible on high-tech gadgetry that can tell you exactly how decrepit your brain is becoming.

Yet the two titles in Glu's latest 2-4-1 share a bond, in that they're both rather good, however different they might be.

In defiance of creationism, let's pay tribute to the workings of evolution by starting with something simple and working our way up. My Hangman couldn't be simpler: it's quite literally just hangman, but it renders that game as well as you could possibly expect. (It's no coincidence it's recently shared the Best Mobile Game gong at the Global Mobile Awards 2008.)

Rather than the macabre lines of a gallows and noose, each game is accompanied by one of a range of scenarios, all of which bear on what you're doing. One is a flower, from which each wrong answer removes a petal, while another is a hot air balloon that gradually deflates.

The clues you have to get range in difficulty, from the blindingly obvious to the deafeningly tricky. 'Fairy Tale' is Cinderella, for instance, while 'Philosopher' is Karl Popper. Everybody's heard of the former, but you if lean out of the window and shout 'who's Karl Popper?' to a passer by your query is likely to be met with bewilderment. And, potentially, violence.

You can adjust the difficulty level by determining how many guesses you get, and whether or not you want to be timed, as well as by choosing which of the three subjects you want to answer on: Music, Arts, Sport.

There are 950 words in My Hangman's dictionary, which sounds more than it is and since they appear randomly, you'll be revisiting answers quicker than you might think. It's also impossible to just shout out the word once you've got it. You have to enter every letter, which can turn the game into a tedious exercise in text-messaging, particularly once you can answer a clue on sight.

You can enjoy My Hangman with eight others people, setting clues for one another, which adds to the game (provided you can find some opponents), and goes a long way towards addressing the problems of repetition.

Not only can you play with your friends, but you can hang them, by taking pictures with your camera phone. This is the feature that unites My Hangman and Brain Genius, as it's also possible to use your camera in pursuit of mental lucidity, but we'll get to that in a minute.

It's worth pointing out first that Brain Genius is just one in a bustling genre, filled with strong competition from, amongst others, Gameloft, In-Fusio, Namco, Ojom, Zed, and AMA. Despite being reviewed for the first time in January 2007, however, Glu's contribution to the genre is still the best.

There are four exercise types – Visual, Memory, Calculation, and Logic – and there's a huge amount of variation in what they entail, from counting the stars in constellations to rearranging picture puzzles taken with your own camera. You unlock more puzzles and difficulty levels as you play, opening them up for the Single Exercise mode, and there's even the option to avoid the games you don't like in daily training.

In keeping with the fashion, Brain Genius stars a medical professional, called in this case Dr Lababidi. The good doctor monitors your progress every day, recording how well you've done and feeding the information back in graph form, mildly rebuking you for failure, and, praising you for success.

It's all very familiar, of course, but in this case the familiarity signifies a greater proximity to Dr Kawashima's Brain Training than to the mobile imitators that cling to the tails of its lab coat, even down to the bonus inclusion of sudoku and, one better, kakuro.

So it's good enough for us to be able to say that for Brain Genius alone this 2-4-1 is worth the asking price, making My Hangman a worthy wingman to the bearded Dr Lababidi.