Gaming has taken some interesting turns in the past few years, with non-traditional games becoming bigger in the United States than they had previously. In Japan a recent trend has started with games that "train your brain," where the games focus on completing activities that use different part of your brain. The first one to be brought to the U.S. with any real success is Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, also known as just Brain Age.

Brain Age is a real training program for your brain, focusing on mental stimulation for short amounts of time rather than an entertainment experience. Through short activities like simple math problems, people counting, and the infamous Stroop test, your brain will get a real mental workout. The game can store a year's worth of test results, and by working every day, you will see your results improve. There are not enough training activities to keep you busy for hours a day, but that is not the design of the program. Just like working out your body, hours of mental exercises would eventually leave you burned out and tired. But 10 to 15 minutes of training a day begins to feel good as you can start to see the results.

Gamer Perspective

Coming from a fairly heavy gaming background, the idea of a game based on math problems and other simple activities didn't impress me. I was hoping for the best, but expecting something that would feel more like grade-school homework than a video game. Could a game really improve my mental prowness, which I thought was pretty high already? I doubted it. The game began by introducing me to the concept of brain training, explaining how more activity stimulates the brain. After that it did a short brain test, then it asked for my name and birthdate so it would know my physical age. When it calculated my Brain Age, I was shocked. 40 years older than my true age? How could this be? This would require some work.

I soon determined that one's "Brain Age" is calculated based on how quickly and accurately you complete the tasks given. In theory, the younger your Brain, the faster you can complete the tasks. I think this could be misleading, as the speed at which you write your answer may not be related to how well you can calculate the answer, but to the game it's all the same. Two seconds to calculate the answer and one second to write is the same as one second to calculate the answer and two seconds to write it. Two seconds may seem like a long time to write an answer, but there are times when you will spend even longer, as the handwriting recognition cannot be trained and does not always interpret your answers correctly, no matter how clearly you may think you are writing them.

That brings up one of the major issues I had with the game, the handwriting recognition. It's never made clear how numbers and characters should be written to be best interpreted, it is simply left up to the player to determine. I would have liked a training session at some point, but I can understand why they wouldn't want to make it a required step. Prepare yourself for some frustration, especially during the word memory game, as having to rewrite 'turn' several times can cause even the most calm among us to yell at the petite DS.

Non-Gamer Perspective

After doing some training on my own, I found a young non-gamer to try out Brain Age, my wife. She really enjoyed the training, even though she had a harder time picking up the nuances that are required to master the different activities. She did particularly well at counting out loud, where you count from 1 to 120 out loud and then touch a button on the screen when you're done. The Calculations X 20 exercise, where you perform 20 simple math problems, was more of a challenge, but after a few times she began to see real improvement. After about a week, she was able to get her Brain Age down to her actual age, no small feat for anyone under 30.

Her major complaint about the game was that the voice and handwriting recognition were not as good as she expected. In the Stroop test, where you must speak the color of the word, not necessarily the word that is written, she became very frustrated that the game couldn't detect the 4 colors correctly. She theorized that using a different set of colors might alleviate the problem. Instead of Blue, Black, Yellow and Red, perhaps Blue, Green, Red and Purple. The designers may have been going for basic colors, but detecting the difference between Blue and Black still needs some work. We both found that speaking the word softer helped the recognition, and that getting louder and holding the DS close to your mouth was always a bad idea.