Nintendo Brain Training

From the Sydney Morning Herald- http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/06/14/1149964544893.html

Best known for frivolous family fun, Nintendo now wants to profit from games that are designed to keep our minds sharp and to combat senility.

Brain Training presents players with a series of fast-paced maths and language challenges created by prominent Japanese neurologist and author Professor Ryuta Kawashima. The game can also calculate your "brain age" based on the accuracy and speed of your responses.
It might seem a radical departure from blasting aliens and saving the princess, but striving for high scores is one of the gaming world's most important aims. Once you start passing the console around to friends and family, competition will be furious.

Most handheld games target youngsters but Brain Training's potential audience is far wider. Using the DS touch panel and microphone to (almost faultlessly) recognise your writing and spoken words, the package is so intuitive that anyone can play.

The dozen tasks include simple memory trials, quick arithmetic, extracts from literary classics to read aloud, puzzles, syllable and item counting tests, plus drawing challenges.

The training games are designed to take just 10 minutes to complete. Users are discouraged from longer play sessions, instead rewarded for returning each day to slowly build their skills. Results for each task are charted on graphs and steady improvement proves most satisfying.
The Doc is always on hand to give advice and encouragement. Despite being portrayed as a disembodied head, he is surprisingly charismatic, although his comments become repetitive.
Those wanting to play longer will appreciate the Sudoku puzzles with excellent use of the touch screen for number entry and note-taking.

Whether it is truly educational and actually improves your mental abilities is debatable, but it is still very entertaining.

Brain Training
Nintendo
Classification: G
RRP: $49.95
Rating: 4.5/5