Most of our regular readers have probably heard plenty about Brain Training at this point, with the title gaining a lot of exposure from its smashing performance on the Japanese sales charts. Over 2.3 million copies of the game have been sold, and it has seldom left the weekly top 10, making it one of the most successful new properties in a decade. Nintendo hopes that Brain Training will repeat this performance outside of Japan. Brain Training is certainly an interesting piece of software, and is far more likely to catch the attention of non-traditional gamers, though all can easily enjoy it – if you don’t mind putting up with a few minor issues.
Brain Training is loosely based on the work of Professor Ryuta Kawashima of the Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The professor’s work is mainly in neurology – he wrote the best selling book Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain, which inspired the videogame. The book was full of things people could do to keep their mind fresh – Brain Training is essentially an extension of the research that inspired the book. Many people believe we only use 10% of our brain, but Professor Kawashima’s research shows that that is a load of rubbish (the only activity that uses such low brain functionality is watching television – even sleeping stimulates your brain more). His research showed that doing simple exercises like basic calculations and reading out aloud stimulated the pre-frontal cortex, and uses a surprisingly large amount of the brain (look around for the MRI scans). Professor Kawashima believes that the brain is much like the rest of the body in that it too needs regular exercise. If you don’t exercise your brain, it will become sluggish and act as though it is much older than it actually is.
32 is also the number of times Brendan gets owned each day
Brain Training contains a collection of simple exercises designed to stimulate the pre-frontal cortex and strengthen one’s overall cognitive powers. The game also has a set of exercises to determine your Brain Age, as well as around 100 Sudoku puzzles. Players are greeted by a digitised version of the disembodied head of Professor Kawashima, who will instruct you to create a profile, which will allow you to track your progress in each exercise as well as your overall Brain Age. You can have up to four profiles on a card, and compare your performance with the other users. For those who just want a quick sample of what Brain Training has to offer, the Quick Play mode has a small selection of games that reflect what’s available in the full mode – basically for trying to lure unsuspecting mums, girlfriends and grandparents into the game.
The brain exercises each test a different area of your cognitive abilities. The calculation exercises (available in sets of 30 or 100) are quite easy, but are designed to test speed and accuracy. Reading aloud will test how quickly you can read aloud through a chapter of classic literature. While the game’s speech recognition isn’t actually in effect here, Brain Training does have mechanisms in place for preventing cheating in the reading challenge. Low to High is a sequential memory challenge where a series of numbers appears on screen momentarily, and players have to tap the empty boxes in order from lowest to highest. It gets pretty taxing when you have about 9 or 10 numbers to remember, but really does help for trying to remember strings of digits. Head Count involves counting the number of people entering and leaving a house, which seems easy at first, but ramps up to ludicrous speed by the fifth round. Syllable Count requires players to count the number of syllables in a phrase and write their answer in the space provided – quite easy for those of us who learnt to read phonetically.
Mmm, statistics
Triangle Math is probably the trickiest calculation based game in that you have to follow the results of a number of calculations, which are stacked up like a triangle and write the final answer of the sequence. Time Lapse provides players with two clocks, and they must determine the amount of time that has passed in between the times shown on the two clocks. Finally, Voice Calculations is the same as the regular calculation exercises, but you have to speak the answer into the microphone, rather than writing it down. After the completion of each exercise, players will be graded on the speed and accuracy with which they completed the exercise, with grades ranging from walking speed to rocket speed. A graph will appear showing your recent progress, and the professor will make a comment on your performance.
Testing your Brain Age is quite similar to doing the regular training exercises – some of them are repeated, but most of the exercises are different. The first of these is the stroop test, where the player must say the colour of the word that appears on the screen, the trick being that the word itself is a colour. For example, the word “black” will appear on screen, but it will be coloured yellow. Word memory gives you a list of 20 words, and two minutes to commit the list to memory. When the time expires, you have three minutes to write down as many words as you possibly can. There is also a matching exercise whereby players must link letters and numbers as quickly as possible in sequential order (A links to 1, B links to 2) by drawing a line between them, without touching any other letters or numbers in the process. After completion of three randomly selected exercises, you will be awarded your Brain Age, with your age being the ideal target (though most will want to get down to the lowest mark of 20).
You'll see quite a few people yelling "blue" at their DS in vain
Brain Training sounds pretty promising as a concept, and there is some impressive technology behind the game, but portions of the title are noticeably rough. These rough bits arise from liberties that had to be taken to squeeze the game onto the DS. For example, the game’s speech recognition is based on picking up specific parts of a word – in the stroop test, there is a widespread problem of the game not picking up the word “blue,” with many players having to compensate by saying “broo,” which is a little silly. The handwriting recognition is better, but again works on picking up specific parts of an inscription (mainly shape), which proved problematic on 3’s in the number games, and some words in Word Memory. These are annoyances that you just have to put up with, which drags the game down a bit, but these problems seem to be widespread with anything that requires vocal recognition or optical character recognition.
Ultimately, Brain Training is a game that is easily accessible to all people, not just those who are avid gamers. The exercises are pretty addictive, especially if you’re the type of person who likes to challenge themselves, but they’re also quite beneficial – you’ll notice that your cognitive abilities will improve in the short term with continued practice on the game, and in some cases, you might even feel a bit better. Brain Training does have a few minor issues with the technology it uses to achieve its unique functions, but all who give it a chance should enjoy it..
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