Regardless of whether you support or deplore the rapidly expanding appeal of the casual-games market, it looks as if it’s here to stay, with Nintendo’s Wii console and DS handheld opening new doors and taking us on a monumental evolutionary jump during the past couple of years. Like Brain Age before it, Professor Kageyama’s Maths Training: The Hundred Cell Calculation Method will be right up your alley if your idea of a good time is memorizing, counting, and practicing your maths skills. Unfortunately, if you’re more of a Professor Layton and the Curious Village kind of fan looking for fun and challenging puzzles, this game will definitely leave you unfulfilled.

Practice daily to improve your speed and accuracy in three different time-attack challenges.

Professor Kageyama’s Maths Training: The Hundred Cell Calculation Method (which for simplicity’s sake we’ll simply refer to as Maths Training from here onward) is in no uncertain terms a mathematical revision tool. Its strength does not lie in teaching new skills, but rather reinforcing what you already know, and offering a daily refresher course in the form of a three-part quiz with the aim to sharpen your existing numeric skills. Over time, this in turn is designed to improve your accuracy and speed.

The core gameplay revolves around a daily test designed to help track your progress by offering three quizzes that can be completed in as few as five minutes. The difficulty ramps accordingly, beginning with simple addition, subtraction, and counting flash cards, and moving on to more challenging tests. For example, one test presents you with a sum with a missing number, such as 8 + X=10 (here you have to write down 2 as the missing number). These challenges are a great refresher for anyone who may not do an awful lot of everyday maths without a calculator, but their real-world practicality is somewhat limited because you don’t do useful tasks such as converting values to percentages, or determining the compound interest on your pocket money. The game sticks strictly to the fundamentals here. There’s also no real fun element to push the player on; the most brightly coloured objects in the game are the flash object cards seen early in the piece for counting. The big hook here is that each challenge can be performed in the free-play practice mode at any time, with each attempt timed, and the top three scores registered on the game’s leaderboard on the console. Once you’ve done the daily challenge, you can pack it away until next time, or try to break either one of your own or someone else’s score, provided that your opponent has completed the test on your cartridge. Visual tutorials precede each test, so you won’t have anyone but yourself to blame when you have no idea how to answer a question.

Leaving you on your lonesome to do maths puzzles would be downright cruel. Luckily, Maths Training also features a multiplayer component that lets up to 16 players go head-to-head using only a single copy of the game and the DS Download Play feature on each of the handhelds. There’s no danger that Maths Training will be replacing your weekly Pok