AMA Go Green

There are probably hundreds of problems with trying to be environmentally aware, but the one that sticks out to us is that there's always someone more virtuous than you keen to point out that what you're doing to try and help the planet actually isn't helping at all.

Just spent £20k on a new hybrid car? Well, you would have been better off buying a second hand diesel banger and saving the emissions created making the car in the first place.

Just gone out and bought a fancy designer 'I'm not a plastic bag' bag to carry your shopping home in? Well, they were made in China and so have clocked up thousands of air miles. Plus, isn't people clambering over themselves to own a designer shopping bag sending out the kind of message that just reinforces the madness of consumerism in our society?

Essentially, winning the one-upmanship war that is being environmentally aware requires living in a teepee, eating fruit fallen from trees and distilling your own urine into drinking water. Otherwise what's the point, right?

AMA Go Green, then, could be a good place to start for the disillusioned. Because it concentrates on taking mini-steps in the right direction. It also manages to be less preachy than your average Guardian reader and more focused on suggestions everyone can try.

Yes, we know we probably shouldn't own a mobile phone in the first place seeing as they're made from hazardous, land polluting materials and, no, your efforts probably won't help much when India and Asia can afford to follow in the west's footsteps and cause some environmental chaos of their own. But doing something is still undoubtedly better than doing nothing.

So the game begins by calculating how green you currently are. A series of 16 questions quiz your driving, eating, bathing and light switching-off habits, then paints you a picture of a tree and some water that gets brighter and nicer to look at the better your answers are.

Next, a Green IQ quiz tests your knowledge of the environment and things that cause the most damage. Then there's a neat list of Green Actions that you tick off once you've done them. 'I've started taking showers instead of having baths,' for instance. Or, 'I've convinced my friends not to buy some new gizmos when they've wanted to replace their perfectly fine ones'. (I'm working on an email to the rest of the Pocket Gamer team right now about those shiny new iPhones they're planning on getting. No doubt they'll see the sense in sticking with a Nokia 5300.)

Meanwhile, the Green Class menu option gives you a daily tip on how to help the environment – one which can also be converted to an SMS to send to friends.

All of these are done very thoughtfully and really do work to educate and promote awareness. Particularly, the tree screen and score you were first given when starting the game adjusts depending on your actions and further quiz results, so you can see the virtual world becoming a better place thanks to your real-life actions.

However, you might have noticed so far there isn't much gaming involves. To be fair, AMA Go Green isn't meant to be much in the way of pocket gaming, but it does include two mini-games to at least keep some happy. One is a Tetris clone which has you slotting groups of people instead of falling blocks into a bus – the thinking being that the more you cram in, the better for the environment.

The second works as both game and educational tool, having you sort falling bits of recycling such as batteries and nappies into the appropriate recycling container. Okay, so this one's a bit like hard work and real-life, but it's quite effective and nicely done.

And those words pretty much sum up AMA Go Green. As an educational tool it's both effective and well put together. It'll open your eyes a little, teach you a few facts you might not previously have known and possibly start you on the path to driving other people insane with your "Yeah, but a is more damaging than b" arguments. Well done to AMA for giving it a go.

Now, bearing in mind recycling one bottle will save enough energy to power your computer for 25 minutes, you'd better go find one to chuck in the bottle bank to offset some of the time you've spent reading this review.