Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes A Day – Review

It’s nice to see the folks over at Nintendo bringing us yet another innovative and interesting ‘game’ in the form of Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes A Day (UK title: ‘Prof Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?’). This could be the title that finally persuades your aging relatives to take the DS a little more seriously, although by now there should be something for everyone in the existing DS catalog.

Brain Age isn’t so much a game, but a piece of fun software that allows you to develop your brain capabilities by simply carrying out tasks regularly. Professor Ryuta Kawashima, a prominent Japanese neuroscientist, developed the title to help people train their brain to get the most out of it. Now, you can play the brain game at home and enjoy making the most out of the DS’s functions; it even asks you whether you’re right handed or left handed and adapts the entire game to suit. It will ask left handed players to flip the whole DS around so that they’re not at any disadvantage compared to right-handed players.

Brain Age encompasses a variety of modes including, Quick Play, Daily Training, and the additional joy of Sudoku. The touch screen is used to interact with the DS and the other screen is used to explain to you what’s happening. This is delivered by a small floating head, presumably belonging to the aforementioned professor, and it’s very easy to pick up and get straight into. If you want to take it seriously, then start off testing your brain age and don’t panic when you realize that your brain is most likely 50 years older than your actual age. The DS asks you a series of questions and then you have to participate in a Stroop Test (where colors are ‘written’ on screen, but in different colors than how the word itself reads, the task being to read out the color and not the word). This helps work out your brain age and from here you can move on to daily training to get the old grey matter functioning better.

Daily training encourages you to play every day, as you can watch your progress on various tasks that are plotted on a graph. The interactive aspects require you to write on the touch screen to answer sums, read aloud into the DS’s microphone, draw pictures from memory, count syllables, and so much more. All of them work extremely well and utilise the DS amazingly. It is truly brilliant how well the little handheld copes with different writing styles and accents. Ultimately, the whole point is to activate your pre-frontal cortex and set it on a good workout regime. You’ll be stunned at how quickly your brain age will improve, so be sure to stick with it.

The graphics on Brain Age aren’t exactly groundbreaking. The only real graphics you see belong to the professor’s head, so not much worth noting there. Still, it doesn’t seem to matter, especially as you’ll be so impressed with how interactive the game is that your own designs and scribbles become the true genius of the graphics.

The sounds on Brain Age are fairly repetitive and not exactly exciting but, again, none of this really matters. When you’re so busy concentrating on answering questions correctly, the noises on the machine blur away into silence anyway, so who cares? There is no call here for the female perspective as Brain Age is truly suitable for all ages and genders. The main focus of the game is ‘you’, therefore it’s all about what you get out of it and what you put into it.

Brain Age encompasses some lovely innovative aspects and it really is a breath of fresh air in gaming. You can compare your graphs against other players who save their games on the card also, and this adds extra fun to the title. It will also let you know whether you’re performing at walking speed all the way up to rocket speed, a nice amusing little touch to remind you of how terribly slow or remarkably fast your brain is. With great voice recognition and text recognition, Brain Age has plenty to keep you busy for a long time to come. If you find you’re getting bored of the training, have you can always have a go at Sudoku, and there are plenty of grids on there to test even the most advanced Sudoku player. It emerges as a nice addition and actually paves the way for more pen and paper games to appear on the DS (with 2 more Sudoku titles due out in the next month).

Overall, it’s extremely difficult to fault Brain Age for what it is. Don’t expect a game, or an amazing visual experience, but do enjoy it for what it is: a fun piece of software that will allegedly sharpen up your brain.

Review by Tracy