Nintendo’s double-screen affair of a handheld has become a breeding ground for every ludicrous game concept developers (in particular, Nintendo) can push out. After all, it quite unique in it’s own right. Who can complain about a $20 bargain bin title that promises to make you smarter? Oh, and it’s got Sudoku, the latest puzzle craze America’s soccer mom demographic has latched onto.
Brain Age is a collection of minigames narrated by the virtual, disembodied head of Japanese doctor Ryuta Kawashima. According to the good doctor, your brain decays when you’ve gone too long without exercising and stimulating it (not in that way, you damned, dirty dorks) through the kinds of exercises packed into Age.
The minigames range from simple math to counting syllables in a passage to connecting letters and numbers with the stylus. All of these exercises are work for your brain concealed within expertly designed little games that can leave you coming back for more, attempting to unlock new experiences. After each round the game rates your speed based on the number of problems missed and spits out a “speed” based around different modes of transportation (walking, bicycle, car, train, jet, rocket). Dr. Kawashima will also sometimes pop up to give you words of encouragement or tips about lowering your brain age; the ultimate goal being a brain age of twenty.
The presentation of these games is where it’s at, though. First off, the DS is held on its side like a book, and it works perfectly. Every aspect of the DS is used to it’s fullest potential (although the speech recognition needs work). Age keeps track of your daily progress through graphs for each game and you get a stamp to put on the in-game calendar to prove that you’ve done your exercises for the day. The good doctor will even pop up with different greetings depending on how long you’ve been away, or start up a short drawing or memory game to get the ball rolling.
The downside is that these games truly are just work, and while they are fun in a quirky way, you won’t find a whole lot of motivation after you’ve unlocked a couple of games. There’s really no motivation beyond unlocking different games, and I felt hatred towards the speaking games. “Blue” seems to be a particularly difficult word for the game, and on repeated occasions several different people I handed the game to would end up screaming the color at my poor, little handheld. What did they ever do to you, little DS? The game also offers a multiplayer mode, but it is severely lacking, as it’s a race to calculate thirty problems among two to sixteen players on a single cart. Where are the rest of the multiplayer games? In short, while it’s nice to have a goal of increasing your brain age, I didn’t find myself becoming any sharper in day-to-day calculations or being any less forgetful. Sorry, Doc, but I’m just going to complete this sudoku puzzle and get right back to training with you for my chess meet with Hawkings.
Nintendo was smart to include sudoku in addition to the traditional package, as it has prolonged the life of the game for me and should for anyone that is a fan of the popular puzzle game. Plenty of casual gamers will get their first introduction to the DS through this title, just like Tetris introduced so many to the original Gameboy. In fact, Brain Age will be following my DS around for many a months just to pass the time when even a short spurt of Mario requires too much dedication. Considering the low pricing, this game is far worth every penny you set down for it. If anything, it’s a good way to indoctrinate loved ones into the foreign concept of drawing on a dual-screened device and yelling at it in public.
