Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day [DS]

Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day is the localized version of Japan's top-selling sequel to the original brain-training game. The premise is simple enough. Ideally, you run on a treadmill or lift weights to develop your muscles and give them a workout. Well, your brain is also a muscle, and it too craves exercise. To properly give your brain a workout, you can spend a few minutes a day performing a variety of exercises intended to stimulate your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that applies your accumulated knowledge in practical situations. This is the part of the brain that controls your creativity, memory, communication, and self-control. It goes without saying that nearly everyone could stand to improve upon these areas.

I Am So Smart, S-M-R-T!

Research has shown that reading out loud and performing calculations quickly are effective tools for exercising your brain, and so Brain Age 2 will make use of both these techniques to stimulate your synapses and get the blood flowing properly upstairs. You'll start with a basic test to evaluate your current Brain Age, with 20 being ideal, and 80 being as bad as you can get. If you're in a quiet room, you'll play a fast-paced version of paper-rock-scissors, where you have to quickly choose the right option, based on when the screen says you should win or lose against the hand gesture on screen. This kind of backwards and forwards thinking is evidenced throughout Brain Age 2. It's worth noting that the voice recognition using the built-in DS microphone is quite good, and worked without a hitch during our training sessions.

The quick calculations are back in a couple new variations, which come off as being trickier, if not necessarily harder than the previous game's mathematical challenges. For example, you may get a number like 5, watch it get scribbled over, and then + 3 will appear. You'd correctly answer 8, and watch the number 3 get scribbled over, acting as the first number for the next problem, and so on. The test here is to see how well you can keep a number memorized for each problem, while still solving the problem at hand. It's an interesting way to introduce idle brains to multitasking, and it can be quite challenging.