Train that Brain!

My wife and I have had a lot of fun playing the Nintendo DS game 東北大学未来科学技術共同研究セZンター川島隆太教授監修 もっと脳を鍛える大人のDSトレーニング, also known by the English title Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day. We have the Japanese version, which has some fun Japanese-specific minigames that couldn’t appear in versions in other languages. For one thing, they have this kanji radical minigame, in which you see floating radicals and you have to combine them into kanji while trying to work as quickly as possible. Another fun kanji-related game is found in the Brain Age Check mode. Similar to the game in which you try to memorize the locations of 25 number sin a five-by-five grid (which I read also exists in the English version), you are presented with two screens of kanji to memorize, after which you write as many down as you can. It’s funny how my scores tend to drop when I work on the Japanese-specific tests as opposed to the universal numbers-related ones. However, it’s fun to play. I did eventually get my age down to the best-possible score of 20 years, but being a bit sneaky, I haven’t gotten my age “tested” since for fear that my score wouldn’t be as good. The daily Brain Age Check poses three random minigames, and I think when I got the 20 years, I managed to get three random non-kanji ones. One ironic game is the English-testing one. It presents words in Japanese, and you have to use your English skills to fill in black spaces with letters. Easy for a native English-speaker like me, right? Well, you have to know the Japanese keyword in the first place, so it doesn’t matter so much. The non-Japanese games are fun, too, like the aforementioned five-by-five grid or the falling blocks game. That game in which you keep track of the sprinting runner is really hard, though.

One great addition to Brain Training 2 is the relaxation game, which is a version of the classic puzzler Dr. Mario. My wife likes that one especially, and she has some pretty high scores. It kind of made me want to get a copy of the real Dr. Mario, maybe for Game Boy Advance. However, using the DS stylus to move the medicine pills is really a nice feature, and I’m not sure if I’d want to go back to a version of the game without a stylus. The only downside though is in rotating the pills. You give ‘em a tap to rotate, but sometimes this doesn’t seem to work as well for me as a button press might.

The Japanese Brain Age 2 does not include Sudoku. It is my understanding that while neither Japanese version of Brain Age 1 or 2 has Sudoku, but English versions do. It’d be nice to have Sudoku included. Perhaps eventually, I’ll get the game for English, for Sudoku as well as for English word puzzles, which could be fun. I wonder, would it be worth a purchase for just that? Maybe I should just buy the English version of the original Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, so I could get different non-language tests as well.