Brain Age: Nintendo DS Game Reviews


	Platform Nintendo DS Genre Puzzly Brain Training Publisher Nintendo Developer Nintendo ESRB E (Everyone) Released Q2 2006

- Lots of different tests - Accessible to a wide variety of people - It can actually make you smarter

- Voice and handwriting recognition needs work

Review: Tetris DS (Nintendo DS)
Newsletter
Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly. Enter E-Mail Address Below: Subscribe \| Unsubscribe

Brain Age

Score: 8 / 10

So here we are. The brain training game that took Japan by storm, challenging the nation’s citizenry’s collective gray matter has made its way to North America, and it was certainly worth the wait. While it’s tempting to start pontificating how Brain Age will open the doors further still in embracing the wily and illusive casual gamer, that’s something best suited for an editorial. We’re here to talk about the good and the bad of this game, and what makes it a worthy purchase. What is so interesting about this game is that it makes exercising one’s brain fun, no mean feat in this day and age. The drills are quite varied, and they’re so simple in design that players will want to come back again and again, all the while sharpening their wits.

Once players start up the game for the first time, the jolly, disembodied head of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, who will be one's guide, coach, and instructor over the course of the game, greets them. From there players have the option between a quick battery of tests, which are a good way to introduce friends and family to the world of brain training, starting one’s own profile for some intensive, regular training, or playing a few rounds of Sudoku, the numbers game that has been taking newspapers by storm over the last year or two.

Advertisement

- DS Game Reviews

- Puzzle Game Reviews

- Reviews of Games Developed/Published by Nintendo

More often than not, though, you’ll find yourself playing the intensive training mode requiring you to set up a profile. It is here that players will constantly be bombarded with various tests that can range from doing math questions as quickly as possible, reading aloud as quick as you can, counting exercises, memorization drills, and so forth. There’s also the infamous talking test, where players are presented

Advertisement

with various colors and words, and one has to say the color of the word, not the word itself. So, if the word reads “black”, but is written in blue letters, the correct answer is actually “blue”. At first, the selection of tests is limited, but slowly more are unlocked.

Overall, the tests are very well balanced, and can be done in a couple of minutes. Over time, players’ progress is charted so they can keep track of how they are doing, and see what areas need work. One thing that quickly becomes apparent about Brain Age, though, is that it’s a lot like other hobbies that center around self-improvement, like going to the gym. By that, I mean that players will only stick with it so long as they’re motivated to do so. While there is a strong sense of satisfaction from steadily improving at the various drills in the game, the very nature of them won’t be for everyone. There are people who swear they’ll get in shape once the New Year rolls around, and give up after a month, and there are those who never read a book again after they have completed school. It’s people with this mentality that had best stay away from something like Brain Age. They may fiddle with it for a few weeks, but after that it’ll likely become a glorified dust collector.

Two issues that Brain Age suffers from are that its voice and handwriting recognition can be sketchy at times. In terms of voice recognition, the game has a lot of trouble understanding when someone says “blue”, and consequently has a tendency to mark one’s answer as incorrect even though they actually said the right answer. Handwriting recognition is where the real trouble arises. When trying to answer math questions as fast as you can, it doesn’t help when the game misreads an answer, and you have to go and correct it quickly, thus losing precious seconds. Even more frustrating is that there is one memory drill where players are given a list of words that they must remember, and then rewrite within a given amount of time. However, there are quite a few letters that Brain Age consistently misreads, so players have to try repeatedly to rewrite the word, all the while praying that the finicky handwriting recognition decides to work finally. I’ve actually reached the point where I just assume not bother playing those particular drills whenever possible for the good of my sanity.

Despite these two issues, though, Brain Age is still a very worthwhile title to spend some time with. It’s pretty amazing that one can actually see how much they are improving over time if they play the game regularly. You can’t save the universe, or a princess in Brain Age, but you can try to make yourself a bit smarter with it, and how many other games can make that same claim?

Mr. Nash

(May 22, 2006)