How can something be new and also be award-winning? This reviewer wasn't sure if that wasn't the first test in Think Postitive!, as a happy animated character introduced this apparently award-winning new program.

That's not to say it's got no chance of winning awards, as it does have a few merits, but surely it's jumping the gun a bit? That's until we read the small print on the back of the box, however, and discovered that the product was previously released in the USA as MindHabits. Mystery solved, and we've just saved you a tenner if you already have MindHabits sat on your shelf.

Anyway, the program itself is the latest in a conveyor belt of titles that claims to be able to train and improve your brain's abilities. The twist this time around is that it's a title that's also designed to make you generally feel better, which is a fairly laudable boast. Naturally there's lots of scientific research to back this up, though personally we'd take it all with a pinch of salt.

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As with most titles of its ilk, Think Positive ideally needs you to make some kind of commitment to it. After undertaking some tracker tests to determine your levels of stress, self-confidence and assorted other factors (which culminate in a score), you're encouraged to return every day to try the title's core activities.

So we did just that. We input details about ourselves and started work on the tests it set (although, given that it's an upbeat and happy program, it doesn't call them tests). These were varied. One, for instance, quite literally just asks you to click on the happy smiling faces. It's a little bit of a cheat, as there are one or two pictures of people who just look like they've got a bad dose of wind, but otherwise it was easy enough to get to grips with. Naturally, the game ramps things up and makes it all a little harder over time, as it does with the other activities.

Amongst those others you'll find a word search game, where you pick out positive words in a grid. And there's also something called Who Are You, which picks up the personal information you gave the program at the start and asks you to click on things that relate to you.

These and the rest of the activities are generally designed to keep you around for around five minutes or so, and that, by our assessment, isn't a bad plan. The games, while diverting at first, are a good distance behind the likes of those included in Nintendo's Brain Training titles, and after a while we had little inclination to continue with the tracker activities that the title uses to assess progress over a period of time.

Granted, it's well presented, and you'd be hard pushed not to get some value out of it, but we felt, after a week or two of using Think Positive!, neither cleverer or happier. Just a few quid out of pocket.

Think Positive isn't too bad, but Nintendo's Brain Training series and other, similar titles are hardly coming out in a cold sweat.