Wii Sports may prove that we can exercise in a game, but can Brain Age prove a game can make us smarter?
The Bad: Your Brain Age is misrepresented when you try a new mini-game; some mini-games are too hard or too easy, also changing your Brain Age; the game grows repetitive; Sudoku ends up being the best part.
Nintendo keeps setting goals that no other gaming company even thinks of, let alone tries. Both the handheld and console platforms of the next gen now have games designed for them to appeal to everyone.
DS was the first platform to arrive, and has since gotten appeal to family members in general, with a bit of success. Nintendo's second party team, Touch Generations, produced Nintendogs first, bringing in the female crowd with the cute puppies. But the games weren't bull, either, they really were solid, fun games. You'd have to have no soul not to love the puppies, and it's no cash-in by any means, even with three different versions.
2006 brought, most famously, the Wii. This had far more success, at least in America, of reeling in entire families. Moms and sisters sometimes gave Nintendogs a shot, but everyone would give Wii Sports a try after seeing it in action just once. Nintendo scored big time getting everyone off the couch and getting even your mom and dad to bowl in your living room.
Meanwhile, Touch Generations is trying out different directions. Nintendogs does appeal to everyone, but Brain Age, like Wii Sports, is there to appeal to your sense of self. Wii Sports can actually get you burning calories. Brain Age never exactly promised it would make you smarter, but it certainly makes your brain excel in certain ways, and that's quite a feat.
When the game says it's training your brain, it doesn't mean that it's going to be teaching you vocabulary, math, science or history. Instead, the game does give you real facts about what parts of your brain do what, and that it will be working on your prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is brought up constantly in-game. It is in your brain, as correctly stated, to help your brain function faster and control your memory. By playing simple mini-games and such, trying to work out math problems quickly or, in a sense, solve puzzles, or even memorize words, the game tells you that you're working on your prefrontal cortex.
You are allowed to train all day, and if you so choose, you can take a Brain Age test. This test is designed to tell you how 'smart' your prefrontal cortex is, as it will have improved with more gameplay. The lowest possible score is 20 (the best). I have yet to see someone hit 100, on the other end of the spectrum, and don't know the maximum.
The mini-games are all pretty fun, and practicing them can definitely surprise you. You'll actually be glad you're doing this, not feel like your in school. Even though you will solve math problems and read excerpts from books, it doesn't remind you of school at all. It's truly fun. You'll test your brain in other ways, like seeing a word that says blue, but it's colored red, and you have to say 'red' into the mic. Sometimes it responds incorrectly, but more often than not it gets the word right.
Meanwhile, the touch screen controls are the main focus of gameplay. You won't really be using buttons at all, and you're holding the DS sideways. To solve math problems, for example, you'll write a number below the problem. This too generally works, and you won't usually get a 9 instead of an 8, or something like that.
But Brain Age does this quite often: it works, just not always.
You do get the feeling you're improving at the games, and you might see this in everyday life, making you feel your prefrontal cortex is working more efficiently. I'm pretty sure it is, too. But in determining Brain Age, the game can often screw you up, and you'll think you're better than you are, or vice versa.
It'll give you easier mini-games testing your Brain Age at first, like the color words mentioned above, or writing every number you see on a screen when they're moving, spinning, or different colors. Your brain age will decrease quickly with these. You could go from a 60 to a 40 in just one day, especially if you get easier games the second day.
When you get similar games the next day and you get a 35, you know you're improving and you feel the game is doing what it says it does. Then you start getting extremely hard mini-games, like memorizing thirty words on the screen and writing the ones you remember (well, it's the hardest one to me). Then your Brain Age jumps back to 55 the next day.
So you don't really know what your definitive 'Brain Age' is. That doesn't help you feel that you're improving, and kind of destroys the game. Eventually you'll get sick of feeling that you can't improve and not want to play, even though the mini-games are still fun diversions.
However, the talking head (who you can mess with once in a while), tells you Sudoku works your prefrontal cortex. And this Sudoku is the best Sudoku I've ever played.
You'll be writing in the nine numbers per line, as ever. But when you go to write small numbers into the boxes, you can just magically wipe them clean on the DS, not use an eraser and possibly tear a piece of paper. Even if the game gets the wrong number, you can change it before zooming out to the overall puzzle again.
When me, my mom and my sister all got addicted to this game (or we played it more than the others), it was Sudoku that kept bringing my mom back in particular. It definitely beats playing it in the newspaper, and there are tons of puzzles. It even tells you the difficulty levels.
The graphics and music to the game are passable, but not something to write home about. That helps lend this game the 7.5 I'm giving it.
It's a good game, and the Sudoku's fantastic, but it's not exactly a great game. Still, if you love Sudoku, you'll love this game, and the other part is pretty fun too. If you can ignore your supposed, ever-changing 'Brain Age', you can get quite a bit of fun out of the mini-games.
Plus, again, it reels in the moms and dads. And when they're reeled in, they won't mind that you play hours of video games quite as much.
Whether it's worth it or not mainly depends on your appreciation of Sudoku, but all the aspects of the game have appeal. So it's kind of hard to rate this game, but now, at $20 or less, it's definitely worth a look.