Review: Brain Age

Picked up the oddly titled Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day for the Nintendo DS the other day, and Nintendo keeps cranking out the unusual titles. Starring the disembodied head of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, this game promises to "make your brain feel fresh and sharp!" Less a game than a collection of minigame-like challenges, Dr. Kawashima guides the player through a number of simple, but still challenging, tasks like reading aloud, doing simple math problems and connecting numbered and lettered dots. These tasks may not sound fun but they've got the single thing to challenge any gamer: a high score you can beat! The gimmick of the game, the Brain Age, is a series of tasks that one can attempt. At the end of the run, the software totals up how well the player's brain is working and assigns it an age, twenty being the ideal "brain age". After two days, I'm down to 28 from 45, but this may be a matter of getting used to the games unusual interface.

The most recognizable thing about Brain Age is how one holds the DS: like a book rather than the normal "Game Boy" style. This is because the game ignores the button and keypad inputs completely, favoring handwriting and voice recognition. Every task in the game is accomplished by saying a color or number out loud, writing a word or number or drawing on the screen with the stylus. In my experience the voice recognition worked very well and while handwriting recognition was fine when it came to numbers, I still can't get it to understand the letter "K". Admittedly, most humans can't recognize my handwriting either, but unlike many recognition systems, the DS doesn't learn as time goes on.

Nintendo is clearly targeting non-gamers with this one, with the friendly interface and inclusion of everyone's favorite: Sudoku! Stylus-based Sudoku is great, but there's only a hundred puzzles on the game pak (rumor is that Nintendo is releasing a fuller Sudoku experience later this year). Like many other games I've mentioned, Brain Age is best played for a few minutes a day, rather than long stretches. This is seeming more and more common in gaming, at least for the games I've been buying. Casual gamers, weigh in: is this appealing? I'll report more on this game as my brain age starts dropping.