Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? for DS

Nintendo's DS handheld is a great platform for games, but the unique touchscreen has led developers beyond just button-mashing entertainment. It's hard to classify non-games like Brain Age; is it an application? A tool? An executive toy? Whatever you want to call it, Brain Age promises to exercise your grey matter just as going to the gym tones up your muscles. Does it work? Well, it won't make you smarter, but it is interesting, engaging, and it just might make you sharper.

The first thing you'll notice about Brain Age is that it aligns the DS like a book, instead of opening it with the dual screens top and bottom. Actually, since you have to buy it before you can use it, the real first thing you'll notice is that it's only $20! But yeah, Brain Age sets the screens side by side, a much more natural position especially considering the stylus is used for almost everything. Lefties, while you still scare me, never fear; since there's only one touchscreen, you can set it up for right- or left-handedness.

There are three core parts to Brain Age; brain age testing, daily training, and sudoku. The brain age testing gives you a general stat for how well your brain is working, from 20 years old (best) to 80 years old (worst). The booklet explain how a real doctor developed some software based on extensive testing of a large group of people and whatever else, so supposedly this score actually means something.

There are five different tests to determine your brain age, and you'll do three of them each time. They consist of trials like counting to 120 out loud as fast as possible, drawing lines between numbers and letters in sequence, identifying colored or moving numbers as quickly as possible, or saying the text color of a color word that's displayed (the Stroop Test; if the screen shows the word black in blue text, you say blue). This last one uses the built-in microphone, and some people have trouble getting Brain Age to recognize the word blue. Thankfully, there's a way to choose which three tests you want to take.

You can only record your brain age once a day, so the daily training will usually take up more of your time. This involves nine different exercises, though only three are available at first and you unlock the rest by continuing your training over several days. Think of these as warm up stretches, not heavy lifting; they involve short drills like doing single-digit calculations as fast as possible, counting people going into or out of a house, remembering numbers displayed briefly, or calculating the time differential on two clocks. Some are easy for some people, and if you do well enough you can open up harder versions. The head count is no problem for me on normal mode, but when people start coming and going from the chimney (must be one hell of a party), I freak out.

All of these tests get exponentially funner when more people register on the card (up to four people can do so). Brain Age not only graphs your progress, but also keeps track of high scores so it turns into a competition. You'll also be asked to draw pictures from memory, say of a racecar or the Statue of Liberty. After everyone has drawn them, you get to compare, and the worse the drawing skills the more fun it is. Plus, if you have a friend with a DS, you can use the download function to play competitive versions of some of the daily trainings.

Last but not least is sudoku, which will be a staying factor for some people and totally overlooked by others. If you like these number-based crosswords, you're in for a treat as there are over 100 of them of increasing difficulty. You can even save your progress on a puzzle to come back to later. If you're not a sudoku fan, you're not going to feel like you're missing out on anything.

Does Brain Age really work? Well, after a few days, I finally balanced my checkbook. At the end of a week, I calculated the true value of Pi (ironically enough, it has 314,159^314,159 decimals). After two weeks, I developed a schematic for a faster than light propulsion system and gave it to NASA in exchange for free lifetime commercial space flights (I would have sold it, but Republicans don't fund NASA). Okay, obviously that's not all true, not even the part about my checkbook. But after a few weeks of using Brain Age almost daily, I did notice that my short-term memory had improved a little, and I was generally on top of things without that mental haze we all seem to have at times. Was it because of Brain Age? I can't say for sure, but it's an interesting thought.

Because the touchscreen is used almost exclusively for input, there are some complaints. Most of your answers are going to be numbers, and there's a bit of a learning curve before you figure out how it wants you to draw each one. I, for example, have to be careful to differentiate my 4's and 9's. There's also the argument over whether Brain Age actually trains your brain or just trains you to do the exercises in Brain Age, but I'm not about to go down that road.

Oh yeah, even though graphics and sound are inconsequential, some people will want several hundred words excruciatingly detailing them. The display is almost all text and numbers, and they're easily readable. The sounds only serve to verify when you've answered something correctly or not. That's really it, this is not about pushing hardware to its technical limits.

Brain Age is really just a fun little piece of software. This makes it non-threatening for non-gamers, so it's easy to get your friends, grandparents, pets, or whoever to try it out. This is good because the more the merrier with these mostly math-based "minigames", and even if it doesn't actually make you smarter your progress will at least make you feel smarter. All of this at $20 is a steal.