My Health Coach: Stop Smoking With Allen Carr (Nintendo DS)

The Nintendo DS is surely the multi-purpose handheld for everyday life. Think you’re a bit thick? Crack out the brain trainer. Got a pot belly? Get with the health coach program. And now, if you’re looking for a way out of lighting up cancer sticks, My Health Coach: Stop Smoking With Allen Carr (not to be confused with the seriously unfunny Alan Carr) aims to offer an easy process to kick the habit. It does this by saving a profile of your obviously unhealthy self, assessing how many cigarettes you currently smoke a day and predicts, essentially, how long you have left to live. Following that comes a string of lessons that help destroy some common reasons that smokers maintain to continue lighting up. In knocking down these ‘myths’ – in showing that smokers really don’t enjoy the taste of cigarettes, for example – it gives the player a moment of clarity which they can use to quit. Included are 15 mini-games that all go towards debunking those things you keep telling yourself when you give up giving up. Even though a bulk of the game is dispelling ‘illusions’, there is a reward system that tracks your progress, so Stop Smoking With Allen Carr becomes a ‘Quitter’s Diary’ of sorts. Once you’ve successfully stopped, there’s reason to come back to the title and reminisce about challenging times past. “Remember that time when I found it quite hard to stop smoking on this chapter?” Hey, it can happen.