Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day

$20, Nintendo DS

Teaches: math, puzzle solving, memory, logic, patterns, money, clocks

CTR Rating: 94%

CTR Review

Do you have a child who needs a real challenge? Like a workbook from the future, Brain Age consists of 15 innovative, challenging timed games, mostly centered around skills related to math, memory and spelling. These include one of the best games of Soduku. These aren't your typical fill-in-the-blank IQ test types of puzzles -- these use the Nintendo DS microphone and touch screen, letting you scribble and speak your answers before time runs out. Other puzzles bring motion into the mix, by rotating letters to be mixed. What's more, each game is paired with a state-of-the-art management system. ETS, take note. After you turn your DS on its side, like a book, you create a player profile by entering your age, creating a signature icon, and then take a pretest to learn your brain age, measured in years. A lower score (20) is the best, implying that a younger brain is better than an older brain; obviously a playful spin on IQ (there is no such real measurement). A calendar tracks you over time, and offers time-sensitive feedback such as "good morning, I haven't seen you for a while." If you play each day, you earn a reward stamp, and eventually you unlock a more games. BF Skinner would undoubtedly be pleased by this style of learning. Up to four different players can keep profiles on a single cartridge. Particularly noteworthy activities include Rock, Paper, Scissors, where you compete by saying the answer that either wins or looses. You learn that it is very hard to mentally reverse your answer, and force yourself to loose -- and that mental discipline is what Brain Age is all about. In Memory Sprint, you watch a stream of runners in order to keep track of the placement in a race (like a dynamic number line). Word Scramble presents a spinning set of words -- you write in your answer one letter at at time. In Math Recall, you must memorize parts of an equation before they are scribbled out. Most of the time, there's a "pass" or "try again" option, which is very helpful to beginners (but it also lowers your score). Other games have you making change, and reading digital clocks as they rotate. Up to four players progress can be tracked over time, in graph form. Some of the games can be shared with up to 16 players in one of four modes. The title is designed to be played in small chunks over a long period of time, and each record lasts for a year. So does Brain Age actually make you smarter? That's up for debate, but it could be argued that it does what any school workbook does, only a lot better. Our testers found this second edition to be a lot like the first, suggesting that you should only get the second edition if you've run out of content in the first and are hungry for new games. But if you've never played Brain Age before, get this program.