Biorhythm Review (DSiWare)

Cinemax releases have proven to be a rather mixed bag when it comes to DSiWare, from below average attempts such as Sokomania to the some of the best music applications available on the system, most notably Rytmik and Rytmik: Rock Edition. This time around, the company has provided a program for calculating biorhythms, which attempt to measure aspects of a person's life through mathematical equations. Like horoscopes, they are often viewed with a lot of scepticism, but still have their believers and followers. Now for such people, Cinemax has released Biorhythm, and it's not a bad effort.

The concept behind biorhythms is that a person's life is affected by rhythmic biological cycles, namely one's abilities intellectually, physically, and emotionally, and these vary based on a number of factors such as mood and perception for one's emotional cycle or logical analysis and alertness for one's intellectual cycle. These cycles begin at birth and oscillate in a steady sine wave, enabling them to be calculated mathematically, and can help show a person's level of ability from day to day in an easy to understand manner.

The application has several different functions. You can create up to nine different profiles and input your date of birth, name and that day's date and from this it will determine your life cycles for the three areas detailed above. There are also love match settings, in which you can compare any two of the nine profiles and see whether you are a good match for someone in the three different cycle categories, the program then giving you an overall match. It often leaves comments as well; if your emotional compatibility is low, it might say “You almost hate each other,” for example. All of these work fine, and Cinemax has created a decent simulator here, albeit one that's light on features.

Biorhythm is controlled mostly by the touch screen using a 0-9 keypad on the side, but this can become rather annoying as it's easy to accidentally choose another profile by mistake. There's also a hidden bonus game available, which is basically Pong played on the oscillator screen using the D-Pad. It's a nice little gimmick but, like most basic Pong games, it starts to get boring after a few minutes and honestly just feels out of place in this application.