I spend a lot of time on the train travelling in and out of my city, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people use long trips to play Brain Training. Granted a lot of these people are in their 60’s, but the way I see it, if old people can not only figure out how to use a DS, but also use it to increase their brain power, then we’re in trouble. And we should really fix this.
Brain Training and its sequel More Brain Training employ simple games and tasks to help you use parts of your brain you might not exercise on a daily basis. They range from Mathematics tasks, to unjumbling words, to playing a Masterpiece on a piano. I think they’re great, but that’s probably because being a writer for a living means I don’t ever exercise any of my brain on a daily basis. And with an apparent brain age of 37, it really shows.
What I like
Daily Training: Brain Training really rewards you for sticking with it. Each day you play an activity on the game, you get a stamp. Stamps unlock things like more activities, different difficulty levels for activities, and cooler looking stamps. Plus there’s a pretty good feeling about flicking through the calendar months and seeing how many days you’ve spent training your brain.
Perfect for trips: Being on the DS, and having various versions for mobiles, this game is perfect to play during travel. The activities require a lot of focus and concentration to do them right, meaning you become so engrossed in what you’re doing that the trip just flies by. And besides, there’s nothing better than spending two hours on the train to uni and knowing you learnt more from the trip than from the six hours you spent there.
It has Sudoku!: If the brain training activities start to get on your nerves, you can always quit and play Sudoku instead. It’ll keep you entertained, and train your brain without putting any strain on it. Plus if there are other people with you, you can turn it into a group Sudoku session. Granted it’d be a pretty lame group Sudoku session, but still.
What I don’t like
Well that was a quick five minutes: Because Brain Training rewards you for playing daily, if this is the first time you’ve ever played, or you don’t play often, you’re only going to have a few activities to play through.
My feelings. They ache: Being told you have a brain age of 44 isn’t fun. The consoling ‘this is only 24 years above what your brain age should be’ doesn’t really do anything to help matters either. Trying to beat your previous best at an activity and failing abysmally also sucks. Brain Training is the only game I have ever played where I sometimes actually feel bad about myself after playing.
Mic sucks: There are some activities that require you to speak into the microphone. However, when you say words, you’ve got to say them in the exact right way, or the game won’t recognise them. And speaking slowly to annunciate each word doesn’t help either, since it just wastes your time.
Brain Training is still a pretty fun game to play, even though it will, at times, make you feel so dumb you want to cry. If you do the daily training the game suggests, it only takes about five-ten minutes of your time, and you get that added feeling of knowing you accomplished something today. But basically, Brain Training is a game, and it’s a game that makes you smarter. And you’d be stupid not to want to try it out. (Plus, when robots take over the world you’re going to be so grateful that you’re smarter than them.)
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