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jp's FutureU (DS)

[July 13, 2021 05:40:52 PM]

I booted this up expecting it to be a "practice the SAT" app. The tagline "powered by Kaplan - the leader in SAT prep" helped. But, this is not what I expected! It much more friendly to non-SAT preparation than I thought. While it will sound faint praise, it's much more of a "dry" quiz/mini-game collection on math, reading, and writing. You could almost describe some of the games as "Layton puzzles without the art or the characters". Well, at least the math ones.

It's basically a collection of games, earn enough points and you get a star and there are 18 stars in total to earn/achieve. To earn a star you need to play a specific game at least twice with a perfect score each time. And, some of the games are interesting (to me at least)

Glyph - given a word, identify it's "roots" from available options. Definitely learned some stuff here, though it helps to know the meaning of the word it isn't necessary if you know the meaning of some of the roots.

Predictions - this one was kind of fun! There's a paragraph with some blanks and you have to write in what the word(s) are that are missing as deduced from the context. Later, this is a 2-part mini-game, you're shown options for actual words (without the paragraph/context) and you pick the real answer. So, even if you got it wrong - you can get it right here. And it feels pretty good when you identified/guessed the exact word used!

Ante up Grade - This is the weakest of the lot IMO, you decide how many points to bet, then pick the correct answer, and then you choose how many points. What's weird is that you have 10 questions, so you'll have to choose 1-10 pts (when you pick "8" you can't then pick it again). So, it adds all these extra steps to presumably add "tension", but the stakes are so low it doesn't really matter.

Writer Wrong - Here you have to identify parts of a phrase that are wrong (e.g. bad verb tense). CUriously you first need to decide whether there is/is not an issue in the first place. Even MORE curious is that (same in Ante up Grade) the selection requires some timing/coordination - you have to tap on a slowly moving spinner so that it stops on YES or NO. In Ante up Grade you have to select the difficulty as a light moves across the categories - and, as I learned, the timing does matter!

Grid Swap - This one's pretty cool as well. It's basically math problems BUT, there are 4 problems at a time and you have a grid with numbers and empty spaces. Once you've answered a question you have to swap number/empty spaces such that the correct answer appears in the space for that question. The remaining numbers/empty spaces will be used to put together the answer for the remaining questions. So, as you answer more questions you have fewer options/numbers to choose from. For me the hardest part was doing all the math in my head rather than on scratch paper, but good exercise?

Connections - Here you're given two choices of question - answer the one you want. Weirdly, the four answers can apply to both questions! I didn't really see the point of this one since I could answer either question rather than be stumped by one - I generally opted for the one that was easiest/fastest to do in my head. Again, no scratch paper.

The game manual is interesting as well! In addition to brief overviews of the different games it has a few pages dedicated to "review" some of the stuff from the SAT (like, this is how fractions are shown).

I think my most serious complaint is that it often happened that I'd get a repeat question even within the same game session. By game session I mean having chosen one of the games above - you basically play it until the end (10 questions is common) and get a score. So, Q1 might later be repeated as Q8 which was a surprisingly poor use of RNG. The game is fun enough to play without caring about the SAT, and it tries to be more "fun" (game like?) with a robot character you can customize and the whole "collecting stars"...but still. I'm surprised this exists and I wonder how successful it was commercially.