When the Nintendo DS launched in the fall of 2004, many people
predicted that its period of popularity would be brief. The
Playstation Portable was coming, and it would give people what they
really wanted: pretty graphics, high storage capacity,
integrated media functions, and the hip Playstation
brand. The DS, it was claimed, was not only underpowered, but saddled
with the unhip Nintendo brand, with its associations of
nineteen-eighties nostalgia and eight-year-olds playing Pokemon. The
DS touchscreen and microphone were dismissed as mere gimmicks,
useful only for minigames and the occasional forced gameplay
mechanic.
The PSP launch did little to dispel this perception; despite its
higher price (by almost $100 US) it began to outsell the DS, and, for
a few months, things looked good for Sony. It looked as though the PSP
might supplant the DS as heir apparent to the Game Boy Advance's
handheld dominance, in the same way that the original Playstation
supplanted both the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn.
In May of 2005, Nintendo released an unusual little DS game in
Japan, with the improbably long title of "Professor Ryuta
Kawashima of Tohoku University's Center for Collaborative Research
on Future Technology Presents: Train Your Brain - DS Training for
Adults". Based on the research of (and popular book written by)
Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, it contained a series of short mental exercises
intended to be done on a daily basis. The target for this was not the
usual standby market for video games, the coveted 18-25 year old male,
nor was it Nintendo's usual fallback market of children and young
teenagers. Rather, the game was targeted at adults, in the "mature and
patient" sense rather than the "loves guns and gore" sense.
This game fully leveraged the DS's unique characteristics to
provide an intuitive interface for people unfamiliar with video game
controllers. While button-pressing is only natural
to people who have played a reasonable amount of video games,
everyone can communicate by speaking, writing, or
clicking. As such, the traditional button-pressing interface was
replaced with a point-and-click type interface on the DS touch screen,
and the exercises themselves are conducted using handwriting and
speech recognition. This was made possible only because of the DS's
'gimmicky' special input devices.
DS Training for Adults, along with
Nintendogs and Animal Crossing: Wild
World, opened up a vast new market for the DS in Japan. These
games were all intended to be played a little bit every day, rather
than in long, protracted sessions, and were based on
concepts familiar to people who have never played video games. As a
result, they were welcoming to people whose prior image of video games
involved gamers going into their rooms and playing for hours on end,
and whose busy schedules left no room for games requiring such time
investments.
The DS thus began to outsell the PSP in Japan by large margins. By
January 2006, the DS had sold out all over Japan, the first system in
the twenty-year-plus history of Nintendo's video game
business to do so. The DS Lite was released in Japan in February,
and has to this day been selling as fast as Nintendo
can make it.
DS Training for Adults was translated into English and
released in North America on April 17, 2006 under the name
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!. On June
19, it was also released in Europe with the title
Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your
Brain?. Both the North American and European editions added a
set of 100 Sudoku puzzles to the game as an additional feature,
prominently advertised on the box.
Brain Age: The Review
Brain Age is an unusual game, underscored in the initial impression
by its unconventional use of the DS screens. Relieved of the necessity
of using the buttons, the game uses the DS screens in a portrait
orientation, requiring the system to be held vertically, like a
book. The graphics are minimal, with the only 3D being an oddly
faceted representation of Dr. Kawashima's head. The game has two
main modes, the Brain Age Test, and Training, plus the 'bonus' Sudoku
mode. The Brain Age Test can be done once per day and rates your
performance in the exercises by giving you a 'Brain Age', with lower
ages being better (the minimum is 20). Training exercises are used to
practice for the Brain Age Test and to unlock other Training
exercises. While this is all there is to it, actually doing well on
the exercises requires both wit and practice.
Handwriting and Speech Recognition
My handwriting is scribbly and strange, but the handwriting
recognition performed admirably with no training necessary. Most of
the handwriting recognition sections only accept numbers, not letters,
simplifying the problem considerably. 4's are sometimes confused with
9's and vice versa, and likewise with 7's and 1's, and any mistake
while doing 20 simple math problems in 30 seconds is annoying, but
given the inherent difficulty of handwriting recognition it is
surprisingly usable. On the other hand, one of the Brain Age tests
requires the entering of four-letter words through the handwriting
recognition, a task frustrating enough to inspire the player to utter
additional four-letter words.
The speech recognition does bode poorly for the prospect of voice
recognition as a standard computer interface, but I'm sure you knew
that already. The Brain Age speech recognition has the advantage of
only needing to distinguish the words 'black', 'red', 'yellow', and
'blue', and the disadvantage of only getting three of those right
reliably. Long-term Brain Age players have figured out
whatever positioning is required for the game to correctly hear the
word 'blue', but new players are invariably tripped up by it. A second
part of the game with speech recognition takes numbers between 0 and 9, with surprisingly fewer errors.
Exercises
The exercises and tests are reasonably well-balanced between
numerical, verbal, and memory tests. One common exercise involves
solving simple arithmetic problems at high speed, with both voice and
handwriting input. The intriguing Triangle Math exercise combines
arithmetic and memory for great results. Verbal tests include
speedreading and syllable counting. Several of the exercises have Hard
modes available to increase the difficulty after one masters the
Normal mode. Initially, only three exercises are available, but doing
the exercises over multiple days unlocks more exercises. The game
provides a calendar which it stamps on every day you do at least one
exercise, and the number of stamps acts to unlock the additional
exercises.
A couple exercises suffer from the need to speak very
quickly to do well, which can be a difficult thing to do,
especially without practice. In addition to the speedreading exercise
mentioned above, which for a good score requires speaking in excess of
seven syllables per second, there is a speed counting test for
counting from 1 to 120 as fast as you can. Good rhythm and breathing
are required along with numerical aptitude to count to 120 in less
than 45 seconds, which may be needed to get a Brain Age of
20. Overall, though, outside of the difficult handwriting and speech
recognition, none of the exercises are unreasonably difficult.
Extras
In addition to charts of performance over time, Brain Age provides
a few other exercises outside of the main Training and Test
sections. These exercises usually appear when you first start Brain
Age for the day, and must be completed before proceeding either to the
training exercises or to a Sudoku puzzle. Often, Dr. Kawashima's
avatar will ask you to draw a series of recognizable objects from
memory on the touch screen, and then compare your drawing to a
professional rendering (that certainly wasn't made using the DS's
slippery touchscreen). Other times, the Doctor will ask a question
about basic life events, and re-ask that question later as a memory
problem, comparing the input from one time to the other. These
exercises are diverting, but repetitive, and unfortunately are not
skippable without resetting the DS.
The 100 included Sudoku puzzles fall into a range of difficulty
from very simple to reasonably complicated. The game includes
tutorials on various solving techniques used in the puzzles, which is
helpful for the Sudoku newbie. The puzzles themselves are solved using
an intuitive touchscreen-based engine using the game's handwriting
recognition; the grid is displayed on the touchscreen and a square can
be 'zoomed-in' for writing with a tap. Optionally, the game can check
all answers for correctness, but in this mode five mistakes can cause
the puzzle to be lost, and the final time is incremented a whopping
twenty minutes per mistake. Overall the Sudoku engine is a worthwhile
addition to a game is already bargain-priced and packed with value,
and compares favourably to that in Nintendo's standalone game
Sudoku Gridmaster.
Multiplayer and Sound
Each Brain Age card has space for four save files, the
intent being that people would share the Brain Age card
and compete to get the best exercise scores and Brain Ages. To this
end, the file selection screen displays each player's most recent
Brain Age score. This also extends to comparing people's drawings in
the drawing exercise.
In addition to this 'implicit' multiplayer, the game supports a
direct wireless multiplayer mode called Calculation Battle
In this mode, the two to sixteen players compete in real-time to solve
30 problems the fastest. The game can also download the 'Quick Play'
mode to another DS, which includes one training exercise, one Brain
Age test, and one Sudoku puzzle, as a promotional
measure.
Brain Age has a simple music soundtrack that, though
catchy, is purely functional and not a masterpiece of game music. In
the same way, the sound effects are useful for notifications but
otherwise are fairly unremarkable, although the 'end of exercise'
fanfare sticks in the mind after the tension of the exercises.
Conclusion
Brain Age is an intriguing title; it is unlike any
other previous game, and it makes speed calculation to beat a record
surprisingly fun. While I was initially enthusiastic about training my
brain, I found that after unlocking all of the exercises and reaching
a Brain Age of 20 that my gamer's attention wandered elsewhere and I
lost the daily discipline I had at the start. Nevertheless, the
experience of unlocking and the availability of 100 portable Sudoku
puzzles justified Brain Age's budget price of $20 US ($25
CDN). There is a good reason why nearly every DS owner has a copy of
Brain Age, and hopefully it foreshadows more innovative
concepts from Nintendo, both for the DS and the upcoming Wii.