Brain Training ( is designed to be played for twenty minutes a day it gives you tasks that you must complete as accurately and quickly as possible. These range from memorising a list of thirty words and recalling them, simple arithmetic and reading out loud to observational exercises like spotting the amount of a certain type of number on screen at once and working your way through a maze consisting of numbers and letters in sequential order.
In terms of the main game, you're expected to complete your Brain Age Check once a day. This sets you three random tasks and, based on performance, calculates the 'age' of your brain that day - the idea being that a twenty year old brain is brain at its optimum efficiency mine is way off this ovecourse me being a lazy teenager, anything above what your brain age should be and you're a bit stupid. Once you've checked your brain age, you've also got the option to train your brain. Here, you are free to pick your tasks at random and you're encouraged to try and do three a day to keep your brain at its peak performance levels.
Quite how effective Brain Training actually is in terms of getting those old head juices flowing is slightly debatable - once you are hovering at the right level for your age for quite a long time, then you could admittedly argue suggests the game's done its job (after a frightening first week in which i seemed destined to a life of having a '70' year old brain crammed into my youthful brain). i can tell you that tuning in for a couple of minutes a day to see how on the ball you are is a tremendously satisfying, and addictive, process. It's fascinating whacking open the DS after a night out and seeing Brain Training do its own equivalent of reporting exactly how many brain cells you've destroyed by doing so.
In fact, that's probably the game's greatest strength - presenting you with tangible goals to reach in terms of self-improvement and giving you enough incentive, through new unlockable games and features, to keep at it. Even better though is the way that one game cartridge can be shared between four regular players, much like Animal Crossing. Although all activities are solo events, players can scan through everyone else's results, furthering that competitive streak. In fact, one of our favourite group parts of Brain Training is its image recall task. Every once in a while, you're asked to draw three specific objects from memory. When another player picks up the game and does the same, it'll present them with your earlier efforts - generally bordering on Alzheimer degrading marks if your not on the ball.
Brain Training stand out thanks to how well it's been tailored to fit the DS. With all activities making extensive use of extremely well-implemented handwriting recognition or (slightly less effective) voice recognition, it's a pleasure to use. One of the best examples of the title's glorious intuitiveness is the new (to the Western version, at least) Sudoku mode. Using various stylus taps and strokes, it's a doddle to work your way through the one hundred fun filled puzzles (from an interface perspective, rather than an intellectual one, obviously) - the left hand side of the screen (Brain Training insists you hold the DS on its side like a book) displays the complete puzzle, while the touch-screen is used to zoom into the square of your choice, shift around the grid, record notes on possible answers and so on.
In fact the only area of Brain Training i could criticize is its lack of multiplayer options. Using the DS to DS single cart mode, you can challenge your friends for a thrilling game of Guess-who-can-answer-thirty-maths-questions-first and that's abought it.
Brain Training is less of a game and more of a self-improvement... thing. However, assuming you're at least a couple of years passed your GCSEs (and in truth, the further you are from your formative period, the more you're probably going to get out of Brain Training)its great for college students like me.
Brain training i would reccoment highly to people of all ages that enjoy learning and improving everyday skills such as maths and ones own initiative!!!!
My offitial rating 10/10 *****
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