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Home > Categories > Games & Puzzles > Nintendo DS & DSI > Brain Training review
Give your gray matter the workout that it needs to stay sharp, focused and young. Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? is inspired by a book that was written by Professor Ryuta Kawashima, a prominent Japanese neurologist. His theories revolve around keeping brains young by performing mental activities quickly.
When users first start a new game of Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?, they will be given a Brain Age Check that determines the age of their brains. Each day, Brain Training users can compete for the high score in any activities that they have unlocked. They also can check the age of their brains once per day. The more they play Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?, the more activities they will unlock. Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? is designed to be played in small chunks over a long period of time and can hold data from a year of activity.
Features
* Brain Age: Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? offers a series of mini-games designed to give brains a workout. Activities include performing simple math problems, counting people going in and out of a house, drawing pictures on the touch screen and reading classic literature out loud.
* Improve your brain: Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? lets players take a series of tests and get a score that shows how old their brains are. This number is called the "Brain Age." As they use the software over a series weeks and months, their mental acuity will improve and the Brain Age will drop, indicating a younger, healthier brain. Progress is charted in graph form.
* Play and Share: Users of Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? can keep up to four save files on one game card. Sharing a game allows them to compare their results with those of family and friends. Users also can send a demo version of Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? to friends or compete with up to 16 players in a battle to see who can solve math problems the fastest.
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Review by: kiwifi (Fiona)
Dated: 13th of December, 2009
This is great brain exercise if you can find a bit of time here and there. It is pretty quick to go through a 'daily training' session - although it could have been even quicker. My main complaint about the gameplay is that Dr Kawashima (or whoever programmed the gameplay) should have realised the repeated instruction steps would rapidly get tedious after one or two sessions. They needed to include a 'skip instructions' option.
The Sudoku game can be quite captivating, ideal for those 'waiting' times (airports etc). I never played Sudoku before getting this, and I am acing it now - very pleased. Still enjoyable to do the hard level and try for best time...
I wouldn't take the brain age too seriously, especially if you are doing the voice activated test. It ends up testing the software's intelligence at understanding your accent more than testing your intelligence. It seems to especially have trouble with correctly interpreting the words 'Red' and 'Black' (and we tried some wild variations on pronunciation I assure you... oddly, a slight Irish accent seemed to improve it a bit, but not consistently). The test runs more accurately if you choose the option for 'not somewhere I can speak out loud'. Ideally, this sort of software needs to have a 'software training' setup where the software learns to recognise your accent - at very least for the four colour words that are used in the quick test.
The rest of the training games/tests that don't get fouled up by accent interpretation are great - rapid math, quick visuals (how many of a given number, or colour, how many pulsing numbers etc), and more.
I do think most of the DS games are overpriced, especially when they first come out, although this one is not too bad.
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