Thursday 04 Jun 2009

The original Brain Training was a stroke of genius from Nintendo. Although it didn’t always get favourable reviews because it was such a completely different approach to portable game software, it struck a chord with people of all ages who were concerned about keeping their brain active. More Brain Training follows the same formula with a whole new set of exercises designed to give your brain a workout as well a new set of Sudoku puzzles, making it suitable for people that bought and played the original as well as for new Brain Trainees.

The premise of Brain Training is simple – your brain is like a muscle in that a bit of mental exercise each day keeps it in shape, even improving its ability to think quickly and accurately. Research done by Prof Kawashima has shown an improvement in Alzheimers patients who do daily mental exercises like crossword puzzles, and the software is designed to provide this sort of daily exercise for you. To start with you are asked to do a quick test to determine your current “Brain Age.”

If you’re in a place where you can speak aloud the main test is a game of rock, paper, scissors. The game shows an image of one of the three items and you have to call out a response. The tricky bit is that sometimes you have to call out the object that would lose against the displayed object, and other times you have to call out the one that would win. The changing requirements make this quite a difficult thing to do quickly, and speed and accuracy are what is required in order to achieve the best brain age of 20. Another brain test asks you to memorise a 5 by 5 grid of numbers from 1 to 25 in a few minutes. Once the time is up you write in the numbers you remember into the grid – obviously the more the better.

In theory you are meant to do the exercises the game offers every day as this should improve your ability in the test, thus bringing your brain age down. Of course, your brain age as measured by the game is not a scientific thing but simply your score in the test, and getting a better brain age really just means you’re getting better at doing the test.

The exercises in More Brain Training are a mixed bag – some feel decidedly more like work than others do, but you’re bound to find a few that you find enjoyable enough to do every day. To start with there are only a few available, but after playing the game for a number of days you will start to unlock other exercises. Some involve numbers, such as one exercise where you continually add two numbers but have to remember one of them each time as the other is hidden. Others involve words, such as an anagram exercise where you are given a set of letters and must write a word made from those letters. One involves telling the time on various clocks, the catch being that the clock may be upside down, mirrored, or both, and won’t have all the markings on it. Another shouts out multiple words at a time and asks you to write each word that you hear down (this one is especially tough because of such strong English accents in the recorded words). One has you playing a piece of music by pressing virtual piano keys using your stylus. You get the picture I’m sure – each is designed to exercise your brain in a slightly different way, and the variety is commendable.

If you do an exercise on a day you get a stamp for the day and if you do three you get a bigger stamp, so you are rewarded in a small way for spending the few minutes required. At the end of each exercise you are also shown your score or time compared to your last performances in a graph so that you can track your progress in that exercise. For some the graph is a little bit useless because my scores don’t make it onto the graph (the anagram one in particular should include much longer times than it does). You are allowed to play each exercise more than once in a day, but only one score is recorded for the day, so the game encourages play of about 10 minutes each day and not more. In practice this keeps the game fresh over a long period of time – each day when I switch it on I choose three exercises to do out of the several that are available and I can normally find three that I feel like doing on any day.

In addition to the training exercises and brain age test there are also Sudoku puzzles to do. The implementation of Sudoku is the same as in the original Brain Training – perfect. The entire grid is displayed on the touch screen and you can touch any cell to get a zoomed in view to enter a value in it. You then write the value you want in that cell and zoom out again. If you want to write multiple possible values in the cell you can draw a small number in any of 9 positions within the cell. To erase these you draw a zero over them. The intuitiveness of this is remarkable – it’s easier to do Sudoku on the DS than on paper. So in addition to my daily training I also try to do a Sudoku puzzle (time permitting – they take 5 minutes to start with, going up to 10, then 20 for the difficult ones). There are over 100 puzzles in the game so there’s a lot of longevity just in the Sudoku section.

There is also a Dr Mario-like game included which is great as a fun diversion from all the serious brain training, and probably serves as a great brain exercise in and of itself. By including it here Nintendo is subtly introducing a more traditional game into the mix to reduce the so-called non-gamer’s resistance to playing games that don’t have the word Training in their names.

More Brain Training is a quality package. The idea is still excellent – a little bit of brain exercise each day. It’s especially good for people who don’t exercise their brain at work or school each day. But this would be a chore unless it was fun too – and it is. The test feels a lot like work (but thankfully doesn’t need to be taken very often, or at all), but the exercises are enjoyable. Add to that a fantastic Sudoku implementation and a fun Dr Mario-like game and you get a high recommendation from me. I only wish Dr Kawashima wouldn’t talk so much!

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Contributor:	Peter

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