Game Review: Brain Age 2
For Christmas, my roommates gave me a couple of DS games. One of them, knowing how much I enjoyed Brain Age, got me Brain Age 2.
The Brain Age series are among a growing number of games designed to keep your mind fit with all sorts of puzzle and word games, and Brain Age 2 is no exception. Where the first Brain Age was really a blend of math and word games, Brain Age 2 includes a music game (okay, so we all know all music is math), and a “relaxation” section otherwise known as the Dr. Mario-styled game Virus Buster.
Dr. Kawashita’s digital image no longer asks you to remember what you did days ago, but now asks you to connect dots and create acrostics (Pretty much every second or third time you turn on the game, he’s asking you to do an acrostic with him. It gets very tiring very quickly.)
My biggest complaint with the game is how few ways there are for it to test your “brain age”. You can either verbally play a bizarre game of rock-paper-scissors, or you can quietly do what is essentially finding the remainder in a subtraction problem. There is supposedly a third way to check it, but it’s apparently very rare that it’s used in place of the other two. (My brain age, checked only the night I got the game, is 58 according to Brain Age 2. I was 27 on Brain Age.)
My second biggest complaint with the game involves the training “Word Blender”, where anywhere from one to three people say a word, and you have to write out all the words you heard. You remember the old Speak’n'Spell, right? Where the computerized voice would say a word, and you had to hope you understood it? Where it would say “trash” and expect you to know that was a word that didn’t even come close to sounding like trash? That’s how Word Blender is. One of the voices (there are two- a man who sounds a lot like Scottie Ray, even though it isn’t, and a woman) will say a word, and the word they said doesn’t match at all the word you’re expected to write. It’s very frustrating.
Those two complaints aside, I really like the game. I don’t have time to do the training every day, but I do it when I have a chance. My favorite game so far is the piano, even if the keyboard just randomly switches between songs. Most of the songs are classical pieces, but they’re fairly easy. The gives you more more points for being somewhat musical in your interpretation, so that makes it nice.
Just like the first game, Brain Age 2 has a Quick Play area so people can try out the game without having to create a Daily Training profile. I need to carry it around to show people.
