The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain – Why I’ll Never Finish

            The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain is a game I played growing up in the 90’s that I’ve never beaten. But late last year I decided to spin the block and finally add that game to my list of accomplishments. Because I am a grown man I came to the conclusion that I must bump the skill level up to the max so I could get a fair challenge. In doing so, I realized that my task was nigh impossible.

            If you didn’t know, this game is made up of nine minigames that purportedly work different parts of the brain, and you must beat each one seven times in order to cross it off your list. Some games are memory-based, others require quick thinking, and one of them requires some quick hand-eye coordination.

            I was playing through this game on Youtube(link at the end) and after completing four minigames I came to the realization that the effort required to beat the final five was much more than I planned on using. But allow me to breakdown the exact effort and patience needed to beat each minigame. I will be giving the premise for each game, and I’ll follow that up by explaining why it’s so difficult to beat on hard.

Train of Thought

            “Train Of Thought” is a game where different color balls move around on a train tracks and by click on intersections you can change their direction. The balls shoot out of the station about one every three seconds. The goal of this game is to send all the balls to a hub, but the hub will change colors depending on which ball is supposed to enter at that time. There are also colored tracks that only matching balls can travel down. You can lose if balls crash into each other or you send a ball into the hub when its color wasn’t asked for. It’s pretty straightforward.

            Now I managed to beat this on hard the first time because I put all the balls into a loop and let each ball out as requested and guided it towards the end. Is that kinda cheaty? Maybe. But I couldn’t do this on the following level. Probably karma. But herein lies the problem. There can be about 6+ balls in play at a time so your main focus is crash avoidance. And the second level has tunnels that don’t work logically, you’d think they’d go in a straight line but they do not. So this game requires fast-clicking and expert ball-watching(stop). And guessing. Guessing is never fun in a logic game. I never got past the second level.

Music

            “Music” is a game where they take some classical music and flip the various measures horizontally or vertically, and even switch their places. You can hear how the music is supposed to sound and then get to work attempting to put things in their place.

            This game is probably Top 3 easiest to understand and play. Just listen to the music again and again and like up the parts. If you can read music enough it should be pretty simple. You will get tired of hearing the same section over and over again as you try to get everything lined up. But besides that it’s cool. I managed to complete this game.

3D Construction

            “3D Construction” is a game where you have an object made out of cubes with four distinct levels that you can spin around and look at from four directions. Your goal is to build the same object using the graphs on the right to put blocks on the four levels. You can submit your design at any point and the game will check to see if you right.

            I was raised on the Legos so this game wasn’t too difficult. After many years spent reading those instruction manuals I know how to put blocks together. But though this game might seem prefect and simple there is a slight problem that may pop up; sometimes blocks near the center cannot be seen from any angle, so you have to guess if they are there or not. I believe that only happened to me once so it’s not that big a deal. Of course I managed to beat this game.

Word Surge

            “Word Surge” is a game where you have a 5×5 grid of letters and a list of words. By moving a row horizontally or a column vertically you must have all the words spelled out on screen at once. Think of a Rubik’s Cube but with words.

            The problem I had with this is that it’s very hard to complete this spur-of-the-moment. The arranging of the letters is hard enough, but you also must make sure you lay the words out properly so you can complete them all. I had to write down the words on paper to make sure they were arranged right before I did it in game. And it was still difficult! You know how much harder and more annoying it would’ve been if I winged it? And the first couple of levels had six words, which seems a bit easy but isn’t because I had a bunch of useless, excess letters that just got in the way. I only beat this once and my second attempt is the straw that broke the camel’s back and made me write this article.

File Sorting

            “File Sorting” is a game that works your memory and will stress you out. You play this by waiting for an object to appear on the TV, then placing said object in a drawer. That sounds pretty easy right? The hard part is every now and then some drawers will switch places, and in the middle of the game you might be asked to find a specific object. The game is won when he has you one-by-one retrieve every object still left in the game.

            This might be the game I genuinely had the most fun with. Sometimes I remembered where I put everything; other times I knew where I DIDN’T put something and used deductive reasoning to find what I was looking for. Did I mess up a few times? Yeah. The first time I almost beat it I got cocky and messed up right at the end. But this really is just remembering stuff. If you had a sheet of paper you could easily cheat. I did manage to complete this minigame.

Pentode

            “Pentode” is a game that sucks immensely and takes forever to beat and you probably won’t. You want to know how to play? Well you are given a 4×6 board(less spaces on hard) and the rat will say a symbol out loud and you must place it on the board. Place two or more together and you move the minute hand on a clock forward. I don’t know how many “hours” it takes to win because I never beat it and I forgot what the godforsaken rat said.

Motor Programming

            “Motor Programming” is a game where you have to program a virtual Doctor Brain(do people in real life even have that last name?) to walk around and pick up all the brains in a level. You have to guide him to do even the smallest tasks like turning and walking forward.

            I do programming in real life; I try to make good video games. This game made me think too much. Is it hard? Yeah it’s difficult. Especially with the turns, repeating of sections, and how long it took for the program to play out during testing. I only really tried to play this once; after seeing how difficult it was I pushed this to the near-bottom of the list. I don’t even think I beat it once when I was younger on easy.

Neural Maze

            “Neural Maze” is a game where you go through a maze with about ten layers. You can go up and down and reach different layers via arrows and take pipes to move to other spots on the same layer. But besides those special Chutes and Ladder additions this is just a normal maze. You know how mazes work right?

            I beat this. Because it’s a maze. It has a little map on the side to assist and it does help a little. But it’s a maze. It might take a while because even the most direct path will have you going up and down entirely too many times. So I put it off until those other games got me stuck and I really needed a win.

Synaptic Cleft

            “Synaptic Cleft” is a game…first lemme tell you that I’m bad at science and I do not remember what the rat said. This is a game where you send synaptics across some gastric fluid into the cleft. You do this by using the mouse cursor to corral them the end like dogs do to sheep. You have to max out the meter in order to win.

            This game sucks for multiple reasons. One reason isn’t the game’s fault; I play this on VirtualBox and the screen is kinda small so I have to be much more precise to do win. Another reason is that the meter goes down if you take too long. So with competing problems I pushed this game to the bottom of the list as I thought I would have more focus after beating the other games. But that never happened.

Conclusion

            In the last video of my Youtube series I said that after an indeterminate amount of time I’d return to the game and try some more but I put this article in this category because it could be YEARS before I come back to this game. Lowering the skill levels just to beat the game did cross my mind but I was already in too deep at that point and had to persevere. But I’ve run out of that pesky determination and have resigned The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain to the stack of games from my childhood I’ll never finish.

The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain Playlist Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWQH4KzaHR3hymC1evzoXNzaucTqaryo5