Sniff… sniff… sniff… Can you smell that? Is it the scent of a winning formula? All you need to do is take a training game - be it brain, sight, driving theory test or maths - slap on a professor's name, and voila, you have a Touch Generations title that will help videogames shed their unfounded reputation of being just distraction rather than education, and one that will sell bucketloads to your friends, your grandparents and your next door neighbour's three-year-old son or daughter.

Brain Training and its successor More Brain Training are two fantastic games that I've played on and off since they were released, designed to improve your brain power, make your brain work faster and help stave off Alzheimer's. They come with a variety of maths, language and visual challenges to stimulate your old grey matter. I missed out on Sight Training, but Maths Training, or to give it its insanely long full name, Professor Kageyama's Maths Training: The Hundred Cell Calculation Method (phew!), sounded like it would be right up my algebraic alley - yes, I was one of those kids at school, someone who loved maths [I confess to being a maths geek too - and proud of it! Ed Dition].

But I'm not going to apologise for it. Maths has got one of those reputations as a subject that, if you like it, you're a geek. It's strange that in a world where the inability to read or write is looked down upon, it's perfectly acceptable to say you're no good at maths, despite how important it is and how much it's used on a daily basis; it really should be treated with less of a cavalier attitude than it is.

* Takes deep breath *

Right, I'll step down off my soapbox and set about answering the question: is a Brain Training game with only maths-based puzzles and exercises worth a purchase? And the answer is, in a subject that prides itself on firm answers, yes and no.

Maths Training is very much in the vein of the outrageously successful Brain Training games; it's a Nintendo Touch Generations title, it's played whilst holding the DS in its side-on book format and it has space for three users per cartridge. The 'game' - and I use the term loosely - is based around three main sections: Practice, the Kageyama Method, and Daily Test.

Practice, the last option, is quite clearly where you learn the ropes. There are forty different types of exercises of ranging style and difficulty, from straightforward addition and subtraction to more complex division and multiplication, plus variations on themes such as timetables and flash cards, where you have to write down the number of images on a card as quickly as possibly. All of these practice exercises are timed and the best three times go on a scoreboard, with particularly good performances getting you rewarded with Olympic-style medals in the usual colours. So far, so Brain Training, including the friendly mascot who moves you through the game, this time not a disembodied head with a level of realism but a cartoony Flash-style character who gives you hints, tips and encouragement via the mediums of speech bubbles and signposts. One variation from the Brain Training formula is that you can pause the game mid-challenge if you wish, ideal if you just reached your stop on the bus or someone's interrupted you.

Once you've practiced enough you can move on to the Kageyama Method, which is, as the game explains, a "one-hundred-cell maths marathon". Basically you pick one of the four areas of mathematics - addition, subtraction, multiplication or division - and are given a challenge based around this, of ten, thirty, fifty or one-hundred problems to solve. For the first three areas you have to complete a grid, with numbers down the side and across the top, and you have to add, subtract or multiply them in turn until the grid is filled; you are then scored on how many you got correct and how fast you did them. It's not difficult to get these correct, as the game will pause for a time after you've entered the number so that you can clear it and put the right one in if you wish. For division it's different and much trickier though; you are given that number of puzzles but you have to decide how many times the dividing number is divisible in the first number and how many remainders it has. Eek! You can attempt the Method on your own or share it with up to fifteen friends for a group challenge, though I don't see it competing against the offering of an eight-way Mario Kart race!

The final part of the game then is the Daily Test, where three challenges at your current maths level are displayed for you to attempt. Like the practicing and Brain Training, the challenge is to complete them as quickly as possible and, if you are fast enough over a number of days - usually five - then you go up a level and get more difficult challenges, testing you further. Sadly, there is no equivalent of your brain age like in its sibling game, and the lack of such, no matter how scientifically questionable, is a big oversight.

So, the premise seems good but how well does it all gel together? Maths Training is, like the comparable Brain Training, a slick package but with no fancy graphics or animations; you are here to learn and improve, not to be dazzled. The menus are clean and the buttons are big enough for easy navigation, which is very important when you're solely using the touch screen. The handwriting recognition is about on par with Brain Training but it's still frustrating at times and Maths Training sometimes confuses my ones and twos, something that never happens in Brain Training. It's not perfect but you'll learn to adapt to it.

Maths Training is an interesting addition (ouch!) to the Touch Generations series, concentrating on a particular discipline, the sort of master of maths to Brain Training's jack-of-all-trades. Sadly, it is inferior to its cousin in several ways. Even for a big mathematics fan like myself, there isn't enough variation to give this game as much lifespan as Brain Training. Though the Daily Test is much, much shorter and therefore doesn't take up as much of your day as going through each mini-game with Brain Training, there just isn't as much to amuse you; it's just solving sums and that is it - no trigonometry or algebra or anything more interesting. It's the videogame equivalent of the "ten-a-day" and such maths books we used to be given in primary school.

On top of the lack of variation, there are things that just don't work as well as they could do. The scoreboards don't show names so it's not as open to competition between cartridge users, and the soundtrack - a synthesized selection of tunes - becomes annoying rather quickly, especially when you're trying to solve a tricky division sum and all you can hear is cheesy, irritating fairground music.

The difficulty is also an issue. As a fan of maths and someone who, without blowing my own trumpet, is quite good at it, I found it pretty unchallenging, with only the division causing me to think quite a bit. I managed to score first place on most of the games on my first attempt, something that I could rarely do on the similar testing games of Brain Training. With that said, there are areas of Maths Training that have helped me polish up my skills and this will be more of a challenge for older and younger people, while there is some enjoyment in beating previous scores and the pleasure of improving your maths if this is one of your weak areas.

I know I keep coming back to the two Brain Training games but it's difficult not to; they test more areas of your brain, have more variety and are generally more interesting to play. Professor Kageyama's Maths Training: The Hundred Cell Calculation Method just concentrates on a fraction (no more maths puns, I promise!) of what Brain Training explores and as such you're better off playing the fifteen or one hundred calculations on Brain Training instead. Educational games have to packaged up in a fun way to get people to play them; Brain Training cracked it but this 'game' doesn't have the same sense of fun. If you're really into maths and want to spruce up your calculations then by all means give Maths Training a go, but if I'm honest it's more like Maths-Lite Training and there's so much more to mathematics that could have been included. If this was a GCSE paper then I'd have to grade it a B-.

Reviewed by Philip Lickley for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).