By Dmitri Salcedo on May 19th, 2006

Sometimes simple things can have overwhelming power. One prime example would be how Nintendo’s Brain Age games for the Nintendo DS took Japan by storm. With surprising sales of over a million and a half copies for each of the games in the series, it was possibly one of the most important franchises to cement the platform’s dominance in Japan, likely due to its appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. Now the first entry in the Brain Age series arrives in the U.S., and it remains to be seen if the enthusiasm that this unusual game was shown in its home country can translate into sales on these shores.

So what do you actually do in this game? The short answer is timed math problems and quick puzzles. Taken at face value, you might say it sounds like the squarest game one could possibly play. Any skepticism on this front is likely warranted – how often were the games that were supposed to be "good for you" ever any fun? However, what separates Brain Age from the drudgery of edutainment is that it is targeted at all ages of players through carefully designed generalization; its aim is not to teach with a heavy hand but instead to gently stretch the mind with simple exercises.

The central theme of the game is that it will rate your "Brain Age" based on your performance in doing simple tasks. The general idea is the lower the age rating, the better, down to the minimum and most desirable score of twenty years old. The implied goal is to score at least your real age or younger. The tasks include the Stroop Test, where one has to shout out the correct color of words, and attempting to recall a list of over thirty words after a brief memorization period. You can test your Brain Age once a day, but the bulk of your time with the game will be spent on its various training games, which are meant to keep your brain limber on a daily basis.

All of these small training games are very simple and can be completed in under a minute or two. There are lists of easy math problems to be solved that never get more complicated than "48÷6", short passages from a book to read while you are timed,

The amount of different tasks to do in the game is somewhat slight, but on the other hand it was never meant to be a complicated epic. Like Nintendogs or Animal Crossing, Brain Age is instead designed to be played for only a few minutes a day yet revisited daily for weeks or months. Even after you’ve unlocked all the puzzle types, you’ll still always have that challenge of improving your own best scores. The fact that the games are so simple makes the desire to outdo yourself even greater: "Oh surely I can do 100 little math problems faster than that... it’s just basic math!"

The game is a curious beast; some might call it a "non-game", and Nintendo itself might site it as an example of "disruptive software", but no matter what term is used for it, it’s actually a lot of fun to play. As the game is set up to time and rate everything you do, it tends to bring out one’s eager self-competitive side.

On the presentation front, the title shows a lot of polish for a game that is so simple. The graphical look of the title is mostly black-and-white with the no-nonsense internationalized style one might see on airport signs, save for one notable exception: the wacky, floating, disembodied head of a Japanese professor. The quirky digital avatar of the consulting academic on the game, Ryuta Kawashima, serves as your guide, your cheerleader, and your comic relief. He’ll even mention his allergies and his stage fright and crack little jokes. Although he’s merely a poorly rendered 3D head, he can be quite entertaining in his own nerdy way.

Since the game is targeted towards all ages and all genders, Nintendo decided to make the interfaces to all these games as simple as possible. Rather than having users get confused about which

Even though the game is limited in scope, it still seems like a good value. The price is certainly right at twenty bucks, especially when you consider that you can get months of entertainment out of it, even if it’s parceled into small doses per day. The available puzzles are gradually unlocked over several days of play, so it takes a while to see everything that the game has to offer. A big addition for this American version is the inclusion of a Sudoku mode, indulging the current international puzzle fad. There are three levels of difficulty, and a limited amount of handmade puzzles are included. Veteran Sudoku solvers will appreciate that the puzzles here are generally well made and don’t require the "layering of possibilities" that soullessly drag out many auto-generated puzzles. The interface is also handwriting-based and allows for miniature number notations in each cell for your puzzle solving convenience. The only real complaint here is that the number recognition tends to be a little off at times.

Indeed, the most noticeable drawback in the game is the reliability of its handwriting and speech recognition. Many players out there won’t notice anything awry, but others who perhaps write their twos a little differently might be annoyed when the game believes that they have instead scribbled a three. The recognition in the word memorization game seems especially off, as it really has trouble with almost anyone’s handwriting for certain letters such as "k". At some point, many players will have to change the way they write to get their input into the game. This isn’t an unusual annoyance for those who are experienced with PDAs, but the difference here is that there is no real mention given that it might be a problem or any tips give on how to get around it. Also, the voice recognition has trouble differentiating between some similar words, like "black" and "blue" for some people. Perhaps some calibration features could have smoothed the interface issues over.

So does the game actually work? Does it actually make your brain feel livelier? Actually, after a few short minutes of concentrating on little puzzles, it really does noticeably wake you up a bit. You can tell the science behind the measurement of your brain’s activity and ability might be sound; on days where you feel a bit off, maybe after a hard day at work or school or if you are otherwise distracted, you’ll notice that your scores drop in turn.

It is also regrettable that more kinds of games and puzzles weren’t included, given how simple most of them are. However, taken as a whole against the game’s successes, these few flaws seem pretty small. It may be simple, but like a haiku, this game does exactly what it sets out to do and simply does it well. Given its very reasonable price, anyone who is not expecting anything too complicated and who relishes a fun challenge would do well to pick this game up. You could even say that it’s a no-brainer.