Common Knowledge Quiz

There are lots of reasons for playing games. For fun, for a challenge, something to do with a friend… but we wouldn't put education at the top of our list. In fact, the last game we played that was supposed to be educational was Granny's Garden at infant school. And all that taught us was that games look rubbish on a BBC Micro computer, but witches are quite scary.

Nintendo's DS game phenomenon, Brain Training, has somehow managed to make educational games cool, though – no doubt in part by not labelling itself educational (conjuring images of worksheets and equilateral triangles), but as a way of training your brain and keeping it young. Like a step aerobics workout for your mind.

Gameloft's Common Sense Quiz, however, shuns the idea of dressing up exactly what it's doing. There are no fun memory tests or sums against the clock. Instead, there's a man in a white coat with charts. Lots of them. And there are daily tests, designed to challenge you in a number of areas – science, arts, logic, society and nature.

Your progression through these tests takes you from 'baby' difficulty level to 'adult'. You probably won't struggle too much at the start, not when typical questions tend to be in the 'Does a crab walk sideways or diagonally?' realm.

All of the questions are multiple choice, so answering them just involves highlighting the right answer and pressing enter. They're not all straightforward, of course – some involve visuals, selecting countries on a map or deciding how to untie bits of rope.

There are also plenty of those dreaded types of questions you get in school exams. The sort that used to make our brains grind to a halt and then implode. 'Tom is about to read a 300-page novel. He plans to read five pages a day. When will he finish it?' or 'Jimmy is Tom's brother; Jerry, Alex's father; and Alex, Jimmy's father. What should Tom call Jerry?' Argh!

They get a lot harder, of course. Still, some questions did seem a bit ambiguous – 'How often should you feed your cat?' springs to mind. Once or twice a day? Turns out the answer is once. Well, not if your cat is whining at you when you're trying to watch Heroes it's not, Mr White Coat.

On the plus side, we learnt a lot playing through this. Did you know that the buttock is the part of your body most resistant to cold, for instance?

The game is structured so there's a 20-question test to complete each day (though, obviously you can actually do them as often as you like). As is common in these brain training things, the test results contribute to the intelligence rating on your profile. At the end of each daily test, you're therefore told if you're improving, which subjects you need to practice, and shown a line chart of your progress. Needless to say, you'll ideally want this line to be going upwards.

If it isn't, a practice mode enables you select one of the five subjects and answer questions at varying difficulty levels against the clock. The questions start being repeated quite quickly, but this just means you've soon learnt the answers and can move up to the next difficulty level. At the end of each practice, you're given a score and overall grade for that round.

It's a shame there's not some more fun IQ tests included, but then Common Knowledge Quiz is exactly what it says it is. It's a neat knowledge testing package, though, which does everything you'd expect it to. So do buy it you fancy a daily knowledge workout on your mobile, and don't if entertainment is what you're after. Though, having said that, it's always fun to see a friend or colleague branded with the logic skills of a kindergarten child.