Namco Bandai developed the latest training game for Nintendo over in Japan on the DS and the game has already ridden to the dizzy heights of over half a million sales. Whilst Nintendo stated at this year’s E3 in July that ‘Vision Training’ would eventually come to the US, it has now been confirmed as coming to Europe much earlier than expected.

Due to be released as Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes, the programme lets you check five aspects of your vision and helps strengthen them with varied exercises. The new entry into the Touch! Generations line-up is set to launch across Europe on 23rd November, 2007.

“Did you know that your eyes’ ability to see is measured by more than just eyesight? And did you know you can help train your visual abilities by stimulating them? The concept of training your visual abilities has been used by many people, including top athletes and racing drivers, for many years.

Created under the supervision of Dr Hisao Ishigaki, a leader in the field of visual training for athletes and professor at the Aichi Institute of Technology, Sight Training concentrates on five aspects of vision: Hand-Eye Co-ordination, Peripheral Vision, Eye Movement, Momentary Vision and Dynamic Visual Acuity. Sight Training provides fun and simple exercises which help train these visual abilities.”

The programme uses intuitive touch-screen controls to offer a quick training regime, with each session only lasting two to three minutes per day, and they can be carried out anytime and anywhere. When you first turn on Sight Training, your visual strength in the above five aspects of vision, which the software calls ‘Focus Ability’, “will be checked through a series of exercises and from these results an overall in-game ‘Eye Age score’ is given.”

“When the in game ‘Eye Age score’ has been calculated, a regular training programme is proposed with the aim of creating an overall balance of ‘Focus Ability. Sight Training contains a variety of ‘Focus Ability’ and ‘Sports Training’ exercises which stimulate the five aspects of vision. For example Dynamic Visual Acuity, the ability to clearly see moving objects, can be exercised through Box Track in which a dot is placed under one of three boxes, with the user having to track where it has moved to. Momentary Vision, the ability to process a lot of information at once, is exercised with games like Circle Spot, where the player has to spot a circle among other shapes from an image flashed up for a few seconds. Other exercises include C Count for Eye Movement, Fast Match for Peripheral Vision and Number Tap for Hand-Eye Co-ordination.”

After each training session has been completed, the results are then recorded and, as with Brain Training, a stamp is issued for the day so that you can easily track your progress using the in-built calendar feature. Again like Brain Training, the more you play, the more exercises you eventually unlock and can practice at your own pace. Once you have trained for a certain amount of time, Sight Training will automatically switch to ‘relaxation mode’. “This is the time when users can do eye relaxation exercises which will be guided via voice commands from the programme.”

Be sure to keep an ‘eye’ out (*groan*) for Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes on Nintendo DS on the 23rd November for the estimated retail price of around €30 / £19.99.

Stick with Nintendic for further updates throughout the day…