Mini-Review: Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day

Nintendo has been taking a different approach with game design recently. While still keeping the classic franchises running, Nintendo is trying their hand at the “non game” game. We first saw this approach with the original Animal Crossing, a life simulator that lets you furnish your own house, talk with townsfolk, and basically just live your life. The success of this title helped to pave the way for other non traditional games. Nintendo’s new strategy has taken even further steps since they have started their “Blue Ocean” strategy. They are striving to please their hardcore fan base while tapping into the masses of people in the world that game casually, or have never picked up a game at all. The Nintendo DS really helped to get the momentum moving in this area of gaming, providing a platform that even non gamers can understand. Now all Nintendo needed was the perfect title to motivate young and old, gamers and non gamers alike to get involved. An extremely easy task right?! Nintendo has made it seem that way with their series of brain training games. A game designed by Nintendo and a doctor to help sharpen your mind, and entertain at the same time. It is no surprise that the first brain training was such a huge success that it helped turn brain training into a multi million dollar franchise. The first edition of the brain training (Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day) series has finally made its way to the US, and as long as Nintendo advertises the title in the right way, it is destined to become a surefire hit here as well.

Nintendo formed a pretty unlikely partnership with Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, a man who has publicly spoken about the harmful effects of video games on the general public. Dr. Kawashima was very reluctant to work on a video game project unless he could assure that it would somehow benefit the player. Nintendo and the good doctor started to form game ideas based off of Dr. Kawashima’s books. Dr. Kawashima had been writing about how to keep the brain active and sharp. He wanted this to translate into a game that could help strengthen people’s brains. After months of research, the team started to come up with some ideas for simple tests that could be timed, graded, and tracked to see their effects on the brain. Tests that involved reading, writing, arithmetic, and memory were all included in the final project. After tracking the results of test subjects playing an early version of Brain Age, it was pretty obvious that what the team had put together definitely left a positive lasting effect. Equally important to Brain Age’s conception was the unique control scheme of the Nintendo DS. A title like this just wouldn’t work as well, be easy enough for non gamers, or engage as much on another handheld. The tests involved coupled with the unique features of the DS helped to secure the start of the brain training series.

The main point of Brain Age is to keep track of the score you receive on a daily test. These scores are recorded for a period of 30 days, and at the end of this time you can see where you’re first score landed, where you are now, and what the rate of improvement was. The final score you receive at the end of the day is called your Brain Age. A brain age can be no lower then 20, and no higher then 80. These brain ages are based off of your performance on your daily tests. Each test section contains 3 separate tests to give you an average brain age. The brain age scores are a mix of correct answers on your tests, how long it takes you to complete each section, and a comparison of how long it took you to finish the entire test on this day, and every other day recorded. The objective of the game is to get the lowest brain age possible by then end of your 30 day run. You can help improve your skills by playing through training sessions that are available. As the month continues on, you will unlock new training levels to try out. The game rewards you for staying committed to the testing, and practicing through the training sessions. Before getting into the tests, there are many training objectives to discuss. I will describe a select few.

One of the first brain training sessions available is the Calculations X 20 program. You are given a set of 20 simple math equations that you have to complete as quickly as possible. The faster and more accurate you finish the program, the better score you will receive. Training sessions show you the speed at which they are completed, and a graph to show you how you have done on previous attempts compared to today. One of the interesting features that should be mentioned before continuing on is that the entire time you play Brain Age, you hold the DS on its side as if it were a book. For example, when you are doing the Calculations X 20 program, the equations will be on the left hand side (the top screen) and you will write your answers on the right hand side (bottom screen). This feature really does help to give Brain Age a more authentic feeling. Getting back to the Calculations program, there are a few varieties of this test. Another version has you racing to complete 100 calculations instead of 20, and yet another has you calculating the answer to equations that contain 3 numbers instead of 2. It is pretty interesting how intense answering simple math problems can be, simply because you are striving to beat your previous time.

One of the tougher training sessions is the Head Count program. Players are told to watch the left hand screen at the start of the game. You are shown a picture of a house that contains a certain amount of people. The house lifts off the ground and gives you 3 seconds to count how many people are hidden inside. Once the house lowers, more people will shuffle in from the left hand side of the screen. Also, people will exit the house at the same time. You have to keep track of how many people enter and exit the house for a few seconds, and then you are asked for your final answer on how many people are now inside the house. Once you write your answer, the house lifts up in the air to count out how many people are left. The first couple of rounds seem pretty easy to follow, but as you get to the 4th or 5th round, people are rushing in and out of the house at breakneck speeds. You can’t help but laugh the first time you try to keep track of the people shuffling in and out. This training game is the perfect example of how Brain Age can help you to focus more as your month of training goes on. By the end of the first week you should have been able to improve both your speed and brain age significantly.

Brain Age isn’t all mathematics as covered so far. One of the best games to see someone playing is the Reading Aloud test. This program turns your DS into a mini book, with text on both the left and right hand side. Your only objective is to read the pages aloud, and tap next when you are done with both pages. Each session lasts for a few pages, and at the end of your reading you find out how long it took you to complete the passage, and how many syllables you read a second. I was a pretty fast reader before I started this training program, but I could definitely see a huge improvement as I played through the month. My score started off around 7.5 syllables and second, and as of right now I am around 11. As I said earlier, seeing someone take this test is great, because you sound like a crazy person as you are reading. A small but much appreciated detail of the Reading Aloud test is the selection of works to read. Each day you are provided a new passage to read, but these passages are taken from famous literature known throughout the world. Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, and Bram Stroker’s Dracula are a very small cross section of the available works that you will read as you progress through your time spent with Brain Age. As you play through Brain Age you will unlock other training sessions, but I won’t go through all of them. You guys have had enough training; it’s time for your brain check!

The Brain Age check is the reason for all your training. This is the make or break period. 3 tests, time restrictions on some of the tests, some not. Do your best, do not choke, and improve that brain of yours! 30 days straight (as long as you play like a good boy/girl!) of taking tests, doing your best to improve your score. These training sessions can get extremely intense, especially if you have other people in your house playing. Besides being in a competition with yourself, you feel the pressure to beat those other family members! You don’t want to be 20 years old and have the brain of a 50 year old, while dad is a 50 year old with the brain of a person your age! Brain Age has 4 save slots to hold 4 different sets of information, and the more people that play on a game, the more interesting the game gets. It’s always good to have some friendly competition.

Once again there is a big variety of tests that are chosen at random, but I will only cover a few here as to not ruin the experience. If you have been following the Brain Age news that has been out (especially on our site), you have no doubt heard about the Stroop Test. In the Stroop Test the words Red, Black, Blue, or Yellow will pop up on screen. Your objective is not to read the word, but to say the color font that the word is written in. This can prove tough right from the start, but it is made even harder when you are trying to finish in the fastest time possible. Sometimes no matter how bad you don’t want to read the word on screen, you just can’t help it! Watching my family and others play through this test has shown me that this task is much harder for some then others. The people who play this game and are lucky enough to have a save slot have shown a ton of improvement with the time they spent on the game.

Out of the entire test section, my favorite out of the group has to be the Word Memory section. Both screens show lists of all different types of words. Your objective is simple…memorize as many of the 30 words that you can. You have a total of 2 minutes to remember as many words as you can, and then 3 minutes to write down what you remember. If you write a word that was on the list you will get a checkmark confirmation, but if you write one that isn’t on the list nothing will happen. The 2 minutes spent remembering words is extremely intense. You tend to start off trying to remember as many as you can, and then as you go on with your training you realize that it is better to focus on a certain set of words, and then try to beat that score next time. With each successive test I find myself able to remember more words then last time, using different methods along the way. After a week or so I found the definitive method for myself to remember as many words as possible, and as of right now my high score is 18 words. You will hear people putting the words into a song, assigning a word to each finger and toe, and lots of other crazy stuff. You may laugh at their choices, but cry when you find out they beat your score!

A particularly fun test is the Number Cruncher test. The left hand side of the DS will provide you with a variety of numbers in all different colors, some will even be moving around. Above the numbers a question is asked such as, how many black numbers are there? After formulating your answer, you write it down on the touch screen. Give the correct answer and you can move on, but give the wrong answer and you are forced to try again until you answer correctly. As the test continues more and more numbers are strewn about the screen, making it much harder to concentrate. Later questions will ask you how many numbers are sliding about the screen, how many black numbers are rotating and other ones to really make you focus. It may sound easy at first, but I guarantee that there will be more then a couple times that you will find yourself scratching your head because of a wrong answer. The key with this test and many others is to find the perfect mix of speed and accuracy.

Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day has a TON of ways to test and train you, but unfortunately not all of them function at 100%. The problem I saw the most often was within the Stroop Test. The voice recognition is accurate enough to decipher between what color you are choosing, but it had a difficult time understanding people when they said blue. Some people would have no problem at all with the word blue, while others could say it 10 times in a row and still not be understood. Sometimes people are too close the microphone, and other times Brain Age just didn’t know what you were saying. The good news is that within one day of training you will find a way to make the game work for you. For instance, my father held the DS way too close to his mouth when playing the microphone tests, which he fixed by the end of the day. For myself, it never understood me when I said the word blue…but I found if I spoke quieter there was no problem at all. I have even had some people say BOO instead of BLUE to pick up their answer. It is unfortunate that there is this hurdle, and while it will not affect everyone, it is still annoying that it is in the game. The only other good news about this error is that it seems this is the biggest issue out of all the tests.

A few friends found out that Brain Age has trouble figuring out what numbers or letters they were writing during written tests. This problem occurred FAR less then the Stroop Test error, and was easily corrected. I found the handwriting recognition to be extremely impressive. My handwriting is horrible, and it only gets worse when you are doing a timed test, but I had hardly any screw ups during my time spent with the game. The ones that Brain Age didn’t pick up were more then forgivable. I looked at what I had written afterwards and if I didn’t write it myself, I would have had no idea what it said. As I said before, some people have certain ways of writing numbers/letters that mess with the handwriting recognition, but this is not a big deal at all. A simple test during training can help you to adjust the way you write things into a manner that the game will understand. It is important to realize that there are so many different ways for people to write the same number/letter, it would be impossible for Brain Age to get it right 100% of the time. Having said that, what Brain Age does do with it’s handwriting recognition is some of the best I have seen to date, and that includes most PDAs.

So you have done your training, taken your test, and now you just want to relax…what do you do? The US version of Brain Age prominently features a full fledged Sudoku program that provides you with a large amount of Sudoku puzzles to complete. For those of you who do not know what Sudoku is, I have grabbed a definition of the puzzle game rather then try to explain it myself. Sudoku is a puzzle game where “The aim of the puzzle is to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called “regions”), starting with various digits given in some cells (the “givens”). Each row, column, and region must contain only one instance of each numeral.” I had heard of the Sudoku craze well before Brain Age came around, but I had never tried a puzzle before. Brain Age seems to offer up a perfect way to play Sudoku. You scroll from box to box with the touch screen until you get to the cell where you want to place an answer. Brain Age Sudoku even allows you to write possible answers in each corner of the cell. This helps you narrow down puzzle answers as you progress. The left hand side shows you the entire Sudoku puzzle while the right hand is where you play. Once you select a cell the camera zooms in for you to write your answer. You can then travel from cell to cell by tapping any one of the arrows on the screen, all while the left hand side shows the entire puzzle. I can honestly say that I have become addicted to Sudoku thanks to Brain Age.

Graphics and music can be grouped together into one lump package. The graphical and musical approach in Brain Age is kept very simple for obvious reasons. You don’t want the player (especially people new to games) to become distracted by flashy and unnecessary graphics, or annoyed by repetitive music. Music only plays during the menu screens in Brain Age, and what is there is actually very nice. The compositions fit well, and I found them getting me pumped up for my daily test. I don’t know how else to describe the music other then “perfect test music”. Think of any number of corny 80s high school movies that featured a testing scene. That perfectly describes the music you will find here. Graphics are also very simple, yet very effective. The most detailed presentation you will see in Brain Age is the disembodied head of Dr. Kawashima who helps provide you with test explanations and other general info. Other then that you will see mostly text and colors, and some graphs mixed in. The graphics in Brain Age are very minimal, but never boring. They help to give the game a very professional feel, which adds very nicely to the entire experience.

Brain Age truly is amazing. I have never played a game anything like this in my 20 years of gaming. Brain Age pulled me in unlike other games in the past. It truly excites you…it gets you ready to learn, and gets you interested in doing so. Tests are stressful but fun at the same time. The entire idea of Brain Age is an excellent one, even though there are some technical issues along the way. While something should be done about the blue Stroop Test issue, handwriting issues never really get in the way, and are easily overcome. This game actually does have the ability to bring in people that never play games. My own father got interested in this game when he heard about, and one week into training he was actually hunting down the DS on his own. The game helps keep you sharp, and makes you feel like you are accomplishing something. It also provides for great conversation starters between the people you are playing it with, and those that want to learn about it. Since I received Brain Age, it has been the topic of many discussions between myself and my family. I have never seen a game bring people together like this before, it is quite an experience. If Brain Age had no technical issues, it would most likely end up one of the highest reviewed games on the site since it started. Here is to hoping that the future entries in the series can help smooth out these issues. Keep in mind that what issues there are (minus the Stroop Test) are very, very minute, and just as easy to fix. They did not throw any off, or cause anyone to lose interest in the game. As I mentioned earlier, any issues you come across are the same issues many people have with PDAs. Trust me; Brain Age is VERY much worth your time. It is fun, engaging, and it keeps the brain active, the perfect game for all ages.