The Chronic Consumer

I’ve read many articles about how popular the Nintendo DS handheld unit is with adults as well as kids, and one of the biggest reasons for this type of broad appeal is the availability of games such as Brain Age. Brain Age claims to “train your brain in minutes a day,” and is a huge hit with the senior crowd. I like puzzle games anyway, so I decided to buy this game to see what all the fuss is about.

Brain Age can’t even really be called a game because there are huge limitations on what you can do. When you first start playing, you create a profile in order to track your progress. Then you perform a few simple exercises each day and can view a graph to see how your scores improve over time. The exercises include simple math problems (Calculations x 20, Calculations x 100, Triangle Math), memory challenges (Low to High), reading aloud, and similar exercises.

When you finish an exercise, a graphic pops up to show you how fast you were. You can get a person walking, a bicycle, car, train, jet, or rocket. Obviously, the faster the object is in real life, the better you did, so the rocket is the best and walkingis the worst. You also get a stamp on the calendar to show that you completed your training for the day. If you do three exercises in one day, you’ll get a bigger stamp. The more stamps you collect, the more training exercises and special options you unlock.

At first, I thought Brain Age was pretty fun. The exercises were new and interesting, and I’d never quite played anything like this before. But after a couple of weeks, the game just becomes too boring. There isn’t enough variety in the exercises, so it just got pretty lame after a while. Sure, you can try to beat your own high scores, but you eventually get to a point where you can’t do any better. What I mean by that is the game relies on written input using the stylus and there’s only so fast you can write while still making it legible to the AI.

After just a couple of days I was getting jet speed on almost every exercise. The only one that I’ve been able to get rocket speed on is the Syllable Count; I consistently do the worst on Head Count (counting the number of people going into and out of a house). My Brain Age has been 20 (the best score) since the third day of playing.

Despite the lack of variety and challenge in the game, I still recommend buying Brain Age. It’s cheap enough that you won’t be bothered by its limitations, and who knows, maybe it does actually help keep your brain sharp!

Click Photos to Enlarge