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Introduction
The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain is the 3rd game in the Dr. Brain series; The Island of Dr. Brain precedes it, while The Time Warp of Dr. Brain succeeds it. Unlike its predecessor, The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain does not continue the storyline of The Castle of Dr. Brain. Instead, it opts for an original plot. In this new plot, Dr. Brain is attempting to transfer part of his intelligence to his pet rat Ratbone. However, Dr. Brain’s intellectual transference experiment fails when his cheese-bee (an intellectually-altered bee that eats cheese) eats the all-important hunk of cheese that’s part of the experiment. The result is that Dr. Brain transfers too much of his intellect to Ratbone, causing Ratbone to become the spitting rat image of Dr. Brain, while Dr. Brain himself becomes a psychotic loony-bin! Now it’s up to you, Dr. Brain’s niece, Dr. Elena, and Ratbone to reconstruct Dr. Brain’s brain and restore him to sanity.
What’s Good About This Game
The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain features 10 mind-boggling puzzles (the tenth is only available after fully completing the previous 9 puzzle sets), ranging from memory games to simple programming to musical composition. In each puzzle, Dr. Elena oversees your progress, gives you hints, and tells you the rules of each puzzle while Ratbone serves as a sort of color commentator and assumes a different personality in each puzzle set, ranging from an Irish train conductor to an imitation of Rod Serling (the creator of the original Twilight Zone TV series).
Each puzzle has three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. In exchange for harder puzzles, the medium and hard levels let you finish each puzzle faster. Each puzzle has you doing something different. For example, one puzzle has you guiding colored “thought trains” through various devious track configurations to a collector which only accepts one color at a time. Another has you constructing increasingly-complex 3D structures out of cubes using only the completed structure as a reference. Each puzzle is easy to learn, but hard to master. Also, once you complete a puzzle, you can keep playing it as long as you want.
The game has quite a bit of humor in it, and much of it comes in the form of Ratbone’s commentary before, during, and after each puzzle. I really can’t describe how funny his commentary is – you have to listen to it for yourself! Also, if you want a bit of random humor, just click on Ratbone (yes, it really is that simple)! In addition to Ratbone’s in-puzzle commentary, Dr. Brain and Ratbone play off each other quite well in the main menu area. Click on either one of them, and they’ll start comically imitating one another!
What’s Not Good About This Game
My only major gripe against the game is the fact that Dr. Elena ‘rewards’ you for returning to the main menu after completing at least one part of a puzzle with some scientific fact about your brain in relation to the puzzle you just (at least partially) completed. For example, did you know that after completing even one part of a puzzle, it trains your brain for the challenges ahead? And did you know that as you complete each puzzle, your brain continuously adds neural synapses to hold all that new-found puzzle-solving knowledge? While these facts might sound interesting (or even fascinating) at first, the repetition of them and other facts like them will eventually get on your nerves. Also, my only minor gripe against The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain is the fact that every successful part of a puzzle you complete (up to the 100%-complete point) gets you points whose only purpose seems to be to compare them to other players.
Seriously? Points just for high-score purposes? I don’t know about you, but I think that a point system would really be useful if it showed your progress or got you something, like that ‘ultra-secret’ briefcase-thingy in The Island of Dr. Brain that could only be collected by getting every single point in that game!
Conclusion
The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain is certainly an excellent, challenging, and hilarious collection of puzzles that will keep you challenged for days, if not weeks on end, and will keep you hooked until you realize how late at night it is! If you can get passed the annoying science-y bit, you’ll be sure to have a wild ride.
The game works with both Windows and Macintosh (Mac). (See the “OS Compatibility” section below for more info.) Also, even though this is a game rip, all of the game’s audio and video have been maintained. Translation: the game will look and play like it’s being run from the original CD-ROM!
OS (Operating System) Compatibility
The game works flawlessly with my copy of XP, but I can’t vouch for the 32-bit versions of Vista or Windows 7. If you want to emulate it, you can install and run it using a DOSBox-based installation of Windows 3.x; you can install and run it inside of a virtual XP installation (VMware or Microsoft’s own Virtual PC are good options). Or, if you own a copy of Windows 7 Professional or higher, you can run The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain in Virtual XP.
The game can also be run under the Mac OS, but if you’re using Mac OSX, you’ll probably need to use Rosetta, the Mac’s built-in PowerPC Mac emulator. If you do get the game to work that way, just open the folder, double-click on the Dr. Brain icon, and run the game.
To install, unzip the game, run the SETUP file from the DRBRAIN3 folder, hit “Install”, and install the game to the location of your choice. Once installed, just use the shortcut generated by the installation, and enjoy!
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