
	Platform DS Genre Puzzle Publisher Nintendo Developer Nintendo ESRB E (Everyone) Released August 2007

- On top of everything else it comes with Sudoku - Good for 20 or 30 minutes stretches each day - Uses all of the Wii features

- Not really a game

Review: Brain Age (DS) Review: Meteos (DS) Review: Nervous Brickdown (DS)
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Brain Age 2

Score: 8.0 / 10

Like the original Brain Age, the question to ask about Brain Age 2 is, “Will it make me smarter?” It’s a fair enough question since the whole point of the game is to attain a low “brain age.” So I didn’t feel so much like a game reviewer while playing Brain Age 2 – I felt a bit like a lab rat pressing levers for cheese and hopping no one would vivisect me to find out what made me tick.

The idea behind Brain Age 2 is “training your brain in minutes a day.” And this part is absolutely true. After about fifteen minutes my brain felt so winded I almost always needed a brief nap to recuperate. Remembering numbers, doing math, playing rock-paper-scissors with my voice, or spelling words out of a slowly

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rotating circle of letters, keeping track of little stick men in a race… they aren’t even activities that would classify as mini-games in any other title. So in that sense, Brain Age 2 is a non-game.

Being a non-game isn’t such a bad thing though. It can trick non-gamers into playing with a DS. After that

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point it’s a simple matter to swap Brain Age 2, which uses every feature of the DS, with Elite Beat Agents and suddenly you have another “core” gamer.

Back to the matter at hand though, does Brain Age 2 make you smarter? And does the perceived involvement by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima – that’s his video game likeness that pops up – make for a more active brain? Obviously, someone needs to produce some kind of research paper to lend some credence to the idea that Brain Age 2 can actually make you smarter. It’s anecdotal, I know, but since I received Brain Age 2 I have played it nearly every day in my attempts to work my Brain Age to the ideal “20” – it’s been an uphill climb though it’s nice not to see “80” show up on a regular basis.

- Omni

(September 18, 2007)