Left Brain Right Brain Hands-On

Currently scheduled for release early next month, Left Brain Right Brain is a minigame collection that, according to Majesco Games, will train both the left and the right hemispheres of your brain, as well as help you become ambidextrous. We recently had an opportunity to spend a couple of hours with a near-finished version of Left Brain Right Brain, which was more than enough time for us to check out all 15 of its minigames and--if the in-game scoring system is to be believed--to become completely proficient in the use of our left hand.

Like the Brain Age games before it, Left Brain Right Brain is played with the DS on its side so that the two screens are viewed like pages in a book. The difference this time around is that after telling the game which is your preferred hand, you'll be encouraged to spend the vast majority of your time playing with the other one. All of the minigames work in much the same way; you're asked to set a high score with your strong hand and then you spend the rest of your time attempting to match or better it with your weak hand.

A number of Left Brain Right Brain's minigames are tests of reflexes and hand-eye coordination that simply task you with tapping objects with the stylus as they flash up on the screen. Said objects might be monsters, balloons, squares, or musical notes, but the gameplay is largely the same. Variety comes courtesy of a handful of challenges that require you to negotiate simple mazes, trace shapes, connect dots, draw letters, open safes, and that kind of thing. Almost all of the minigames have a very sterile visual style that's reminiscent of previous Brain Age games. In fact, the only exceptions are the whack-a-mole-style monster-bashing game and another in which you save Earth from a meteor shower. In the latter minigame, you tap said planetoids and push them back toward the top of the screen.

We're no experts, but the method used to determine your ambidexterity rating in Left Brain Right Brain appears to be crude at best. The game simply looks at the scores you achieve with your strong hand and weak hand. It then compares them to come up with a percentage that indicates how good you are with your weaker hand. Any score over 80 percent makes you a "master," though based on our experiences to date, even those of you who consider yourselves to be anything but ambidextrous will have little trouble attaining that status. Expect a full review of Left Brain Right Brain in the not-too-distant future.