- New Activities! The title is a series of minigames designed to give your brain a workout. The 17 new, engaging activities are all designed to help work your brain and increase blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. Whether you’re playing simple songs on a piano keyboard or monitoring the photo finish of a footrace, you’ll love your new mental workout!
- Keep training! When you start a new game, you will take a series of tests and get a score that shows how old your brain is. This number is called your Brain Age. With daily training over weeks and months, you can improve your mental acuity and lower your Brain Age. Progress is charted in graph form.
- Expanded multiplayer! You can keep up to four save files on one game card. Sharing a game allows you to compete in a picture-drawing quiz or a word challenge with family and friends. You can also use DS Download Play to send a demo to friends or compete with up to 16 players in one of four fun modes.
Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day!
The first Brain Age on the Nintendo DS spawned a whole generation of brain training games. Now they’re back with Brain Age 2 – and I really feel they did a great job of enhancing the game’s functionality!
First, the infamous “voice test”. In Brain Age 1, it was the classic see-a-colored-word-say-the-color game that so many magazines and websites print. The big problem there was that blue and black always got confused. With this one, they changed it to rock-paper-scizzors. It’s just as challenging, and we’ve never had any problems with it understanding us. Hurrah!
Next, the mini-games. I appreciated the challenge of the Brain Age 1 games, but they were pretty boring. They just weren’t much fun to play, especially compared to some of the other games on the market.
They did a great job of revamping the games in Brain Age 2. Some of them are still on the boring side, like the ‘running people’ game where you try to figure out what place the dark player comes in. Most of them, though, are truly fun to play. The spinning letters game where you try to figure out what word they spell can be quite challenging. I love the piano game where you try to play along with the song.
There are the usual graphing options, so you can see your progress over time, and then the “brain age” with an ideal age of 20. Just like with the first game, I have to protest that it’s a silly idea that your brain is best at 20. Your brain can easily be very slow at 20 and much better at 30! They should rate it as a 0% to 100%, rather than pushing this idea that youth is best. What’s next, a diet program that gets you to weigh the weight of an “ideal 20 year old”?
Still, it is certainly valid that the more you use your brain, the better it gets. Everyone needs to keep their brains exercised and fresh. Playing this game is far better than sitting back and passively watching TV all night. Best of all, you can bring this along with you and increase your brain power while you ride the bus, wait in line, and do other boring tasks!
Highly recommended!
Rating: 5 / 5
I have to say I like Brain Age 2 more than I liked the original. I found the first version of the game frustrating (yet still engaging) because the handwriting recognition and voice recognition to be problematic.
This new version seems to have improved immensely. I see a few reviews here inidcating that some users are having problems with voice recognition, but that’s not what I am experiencing with the game. The Rock, Paper, Scissors game is working flawlessly for me, unless I stutter, stammer, or someone says something in the background. I especially like that the game requires you to answer with EITHER a correct or incorrect answer! Furthermore, I have absolutely awful handwriting, yet the game is doing an excellent job recognizing my chicken scratch!
Best of all, the game is addictive and has me playing constantly. I’m a fan of games like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy where you ultimately compete against yourself to improve your score (or compete against others if you are so inclined). There are enough challenging mini-games (including sudoku) to keep the game interesting for quite awhile. It is certainly worth the price!
However, it would be a mistake to believe these games are any REAL indication of innate cognitive skill and performance. The game claims to help make your brain more agile and that may be possible. Research is, in fact, showing the benefits for people to continue to solve puzzles, read, and perform other complex cognitive tasks to stave off the effects of mental aging and even help recovery from brain injury. I think Brain Age will improve mental agility, but players should not be discouraged if their initial scores are not high. This is a GAME first and foremost, not an IQ test. Play it and enjoy it!! If your brain becomes more efficient at processing information consider it a bonus of playing a very enjoyable game.
Rating: 4 / 5
Brain Age 2, like the original Brain Age, is still the best Sudoku game available on the Nintendo DS. It makes excellent use of both screens (no wasted space or tiny, hard to see numbers that plague other “dedicated” Sudoku games on the DS). As I said in my review of the original Brain Age, I wish Nintendo would come out with a dedicated Sudoku game on the DS using this layout. They could rake in a lot of extra cash.
As far as the “main event”, I pretty much agree with what the other reviewers have posted here.
I haven’t unlocked all of the games yet, but so far, “Word Scramble” is my favorite.
Some of the new games are improved variations of the original games. “Memory Sprint”, where you try to keep track of what place a race runner is in, is more fun than the original game of counting how many people go into and out of a house.
I also like the “Change Maker” and “Sign Finder” games, because they provide some real world practice, although some people may find them boring, or too much like homework.
The “Piano Player” game was a disappointment, because everybody here seemed to be talking it up, including keyboard players, and that’s a bit scary because this type of “follow the bouncing ball” music game is available on just about any cheap electronic keyboard out there.
The “Word Blend” game is lost on me – you do need to concentrate to separate the simultaneously spoken words, but it seems to ultimately be a test of one’s hearing (and patience).
My major gripes with the Brain Age series are:
1. Like other reviewers have said, the “scoring” implies that a younger brain must be better than an older brain. This is misleading and insulting. If Dr. Kawashima had a hand in this aspect of the game design, well, he needs to grow up a bit.
2. There’s too much Dr. Kawashima! Even in “Quick Play” mode, there’s “too much fuss” to paraphrase the good Doctor. I don’t want to have to tap past the same screens of the Doctor telling me what’s good for my brain umpteen times. I just want to play the dang game!
Still, there are worse ways to blow a few idle minutes every day than playing games like Brain Age.
Rating: 3 / 5
Brain Age 2 offers more of the same this time around, and if you played the original, surprise smash hit for the DS, then you’ll know that this isn’t a bad thing. Brain Age 2 supplies just what the cover of the box says it does: it’s more training for your brain. The game is easy to get into for newcomers and veterans alike thanks to offering the same, simple structure as before while offering new takes on the mini-games themselves. Combine that with some solid multiplayer capabilities, more great sudoku, and much more complicated math problems; and Brain Age 2 ends up being a winner. The biggest flaw of Brain Age 2 however remains left over from the first game: the handwriting and speech recognition features are still somewhat shaky. That aside though, Brain Age 2 succeeds by following the same formula as before: addictive gameplay, clean presentation, and a budget price; and in those departments alone, Brain Age 2 is worth checking out.
Rating: 4 / 5
Brain Age was quite the success on the DS. At the time of its release it was something quite new and unique. An interactive puzzle experience. The game was followed up later with Big Brain Academy and that was also pretty good. Now we’ve got Brain Age 2 which is more or less an expansion to the first one.
The mini-games here are fun and addictive much like the first one. A lot of it actually comes from the first game but now they’ve added more twists to the games or updated some of them. Not every mini-game is a winner, but if you liked the first Brain Age game, then this one should satisfy. These mini-games are quite a challenge too. Especially because some of the “twists” they threw into these games really actually makes you start thinking, or better yet, memorizing things.
Nintendo also threw in some multi-player this time. You and your friends can compete and it only takes one card to do so. The rest of your friends just have to bring their DS along.
The two biggest problems of the first Brain Age still exists here however. Games that require you to speak or games that require you to write don’t always work in your favor. You could say the correct answer but for some reason the game won’t “hear” you correctly and you’ll get it wrong and get penalized. Just the same when it comes to handwriting simulation games it might not be able to “read” your handwriting. It’s actually pretty annoying and you’re unfairly penalized for it.
Despite that, however, Brain Age 2 is still a fun game and a great follow up to the first game. If you liked the first one, chances are the second one will be enjoyable as well.
Rating: 4 / 5