by Chris Buffa on Monday, March 27, 2006
Nintendo's been disrupting the videogame market by releasing software that appeals to all age groups. Certainly, the famous videogame publisher wants to appeal to its core audience, but that group is no longer representative of the average game buyer, and in order to tackle Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is out to not only grab its fan base but also non gamers as well. Thus, we have Brain Age, an unconventional "videogame" for the Nintendo DS that does far more than enhance your reflexes.
The whole point of the game is to put yourself through a series of supposed "brain exercises" that have been designed to strengthen your Prefrontal Cortex, which is your brain's "control tower". Created by brain guru Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the exercises/mini games are quite simple in design but at times incredibly difficult to get the hang of. Something like simple arithmetic seemed easy at first (11+5, 6x0, 9-4) until I had to blaze through 100 problems in a minute. Even memorization is tricky, as the game asked me to memorize a bunch of numbers, and, after they've disappeared, forced me to jot them down in lowest to highest order.
Brain Age contains a decent amount of these exercises, though at the onset only a handful are available. Having to unlock the rest was disappointing to me at first, but the game is only supposed to be played for several minutes a day and it doesn't take long to access them. Plus, replay value I a wonderful thing, so I don't mind replaying the same mini games, especially when I can unlock stuff.
At the onset, a Kawashima inspired talking head walks you through creating an account, and from there it sets up a daily regimen of exercises, and at the end of each session Kawashima will tell you your brain's age. The ideal number is 20, which represents a healthy brain firing on all cylinders, but it's not uncommon for someone to discover that they've got the brain of a 65 year old. That's a horrible realization if they're 17, but it's more a representation of what your brain is like in its current state, and over time it's possible to lower your score. Plus, the game keeps a graph of your progress, so you can see just how far you've come.
In addition to the daily exercises, Nintendo's added a plethora of Sudoku puzzles, and it's because of them why I decided to give this game a 4/5. Spread across a few difficulty levels, these brain teasers are quite difficult to solve, especially since the game limits you to just five mistakes. But there isn't a time limit, so feel free to chew the end of your pencil and wipe the sweat from your brow as you wrack your brain over them.
There's also multiplayer, but it's disappointingly limited and feels more like an afterthought. Up to 16 people can play Calculation Battle (first person to solve 30 math problems wins) and that's a fun, but that's all you can do aside from sending out a demo of the game. I love the frantic intensity generated by Calculation Battle, but Nintendo should have included other games.
The game's most impressive aspect should have been its ability to strengthen our brains, and to Kawashima's credit, I have become quicker at solving math problems and better at memorizing numerical patterns, but Brain Age's best feature is its touch screen/voice recognition. It's certainly not perfect, as I've run into situations where I was writing the correct answer and the game was telling me that I was wrong, but for the most part, it's spot on. The software does an amazing job at identifying numbers even if they're sloppily written, and the voice recognition is decent enough. There were still very rare instances when it failed to identify what I was saying, but that never happened enough to anger me.
Brain Age is a good game, but it's not an amazing one. I'm not exactly doing back flips over it, but I always have the desire to reach for it every day. It has a special addictive quality, and the inclusion of Sudoku pushes it to must buy status.
Previous Page
Next Page