Brain Training - Nintendo DS

[Dog Pants]

Dr Kawashima's Brain Training - Nintendo DS

I bought this after seeing the adverts for More Brain Training. It's been kind of a flagship game for the DS and I've been curious about it for ages, so I bit the bullet.

It's an interesting concept. Not a game as such, but a series of exercises that are supposed to increase your mental agility or, as Dr Kawashima puts it, lower your brain age.

There are a few different things to do here. First there are the brain age tests. You can do the test once a day, and the consist of three exercises from a selection of many. Some involve you reading stuff out, some involve memory. After the three tests you get told your adjusted brain age, and it's plotted on a chart.
Then there are the training exercises. These start off with simple mental arithmetic done as quickly as possible, and with reading out loud (or in your head, as it doesn't listen) as quickly as possible. Every day you do the training a new exercise is unlocked, all quite different and all quite challenging. Again, the results are plotted on a graph and can be compared with other people who use your DS.
Thirdly, there are the sudoku puzzles. These work very well with the stylus, allowing little notes to be put in the squares to track possible outcomes. The basic puzzles are quite easy, the intermediate are hard. I play sudoku puzzles so I know the techniques, but there's not much of a tutorial so if you're not familiar with them you might be a bit stuck.
Lastly, there are little bits of things that Dr Kawashima (whose disembodied head hovers about offering tips on the menu screens like Holly from Red Dwarf) drops on you inbetween doing things. So far I've had to draw several things from memory, then once myself and Mrs Pants have done it he compares the two, where we both get to laugh at each others' crappy drawings.

I think Brain Training is a great little social game. Okay, so it's not a game but I can't think what else to call it. Mrs Pants and I compete against each other for an hour or so every evening and it's always entertaining. The progress graphs give you a sense of achievement and the exercises are pleasantly challenging. It's probably not for everyone, but for people who like puzzles like sudoku and crosswords it might well prove very entertaining.

[FatherJack]

I like word puzzles, but hate number ones. The rest of my family all do sudoku, but I always pwn at the Countdown conundrum.

Is brain age the same as mental age though? If so, I'd better not try it.

[Dog Pants]

They're not really puzzles, apart from the sudoku, they're more like exercises. I know I said puzzles a few times but that's more because of the feel of them (and because I was trying to vary my words). I've not encountered that many of them so far, but some I've seen are:

Simple sums (8+2, 2x4 etc) to be done as fast as you can.

A list of about 30 four-letter words (no, not that kind) of which you have to remember as many as possible.

Coloured words, where you have to say the colour of the word, not the word (ie, yellow, blue, red, black)

A little house with people quickly going in and out, and you have to count how many are left in the house at the end.

Quickly counting how many syllables are in a short sentence.

On their own I doubt that they'd be very entertaining, but as part of a bigger exercise with graphical results and competition against other users it's quite compelling. It feels like the same sort of drive as collecting badges in BEEF.

[eion]

I bought this after seeing the adverts for More Brain Training.

Now that's brain training.