Brain Strainers is a collection of two separate games/learning tools.
The first game is "Follow The Leader" where a pattern is repeated using a 4-color circle. By keeping track of either the tones generated or the colors flashing, the player can copy the sequence to continue. Higher difficulties increase speed and allow only tone identification of sequences. Additionally it keeps track of your best number of correct identifications in a row.
The second game is "Clef Climber" where the player is given a tone that corresponds to a certain musical note and must match the note being played. Lower difficulties provide a constant tone to refer to and visual help on the note being used. Higher difficulties provide a single playing of the tone and no visual help.
Charlie Brown's ABC's is a simple educational game designed for children ages 3-7. Featuring Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters, the game presents each of the 26 letters in the alphabet along with a brief animation to go along with it. Each animation has a different object that starts with the letter in question and one or more Peanuts characters interacting with it (such as Charlie Brown playing the guitar for the letter "G", or Snoopy dancing to music on the radio for "R"). Player's can select a letter and see the corresponding word and animation by pressing the letter on the keyboard, or the arrow keys can be used to cycle through each letter (forwards and backwards) in alphabetical order. The game package also included a set of activity cards which provided additional suggestions for parents or teachers to help kids learn the alphabet using the game.
Compose and play a musical score using an easy graphical interface and toolkit. Use a pointer to drag notes, sharps, and other music nomenclature directly onto a staff, then play your creation. You can cut, copy, and paste entire sections of music, as well as print your masterpiece.
Melody Master is a fantastic cartridge that, when used in conjunction with your Vectrex light pen, introduces you to the exciting world of music. It allows you to compose your own melodies and even has the capability to play flute and piano harmony with rhythm sections of snare and cymbals.
You can create your own electronic musical masterpiece and amaze your friends that this interactive cartridge in a quarter century old gaming system allowed you to compose it.
There is also a tutorial program for those of us who are not musically inclined. The "Songman" teaches you to recognize notes and identify other concepts of musical notation. It is a true interactive educational and creative experience.
In my opinion, the feel of this cartridge rates 9-10, controls 7-10, and overall 8-10. It is a fun software title to sink hours of creative fun into on your Vectrex.
For use with Amiga's Joyboard controller. A prototype game that was mass produced! It seems that Amiga sent these carts off to a company that handled the task of labeling them. During this time Amiga was in trouble and the games never got labeled or retrieved by Amiga. Years later they were sold off as scrap to a videogame dealer who added his own label and sold them to the classic community. Gameplay is similar to the handheld game, Simon.
With this cartridge, the Odyssey 2 can play music thanks to the 3 stored tunes. The user can of course play its own music and record it. This introduction to computer music do not stop here: the user can play with tunes, modifying note duration, for example. The cartridge also provides training through a musical dictation feature.
An early music composition game released for the Atari 400 and 800, and one of the first applications which allowed users to create their own chiptunes.