Brain Age 2 (DS)

You want more? You mean you're not still playing the first one?
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

How much training does your brain really need?

That's the question seemingly begged by the subtitle to Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! Like its predecessor, Brain Age 2 asks players to complete basic, grade-school-level mental tasks as quickly as possible to 'activate the prefrontal cortex' and keep the brain sharp and alert. And as with its predecessor, these training games eschew complexity in favor of accessibility, and depth in favor of quick play.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this design -- as the title implies, this is a game meant to be played for minutes a day, not to engage for hours through a long plane flight. But the fact that this sequel needs to exist at all speaks to the greatest flaw of the Brain Age concept -- even playing for mere minutes a day, these simple puzzles just don't hold up very well over the long haul.

As anyone with an overly simple desk job will tell you, doing the same basic tasks over and over, day in and day out, tends to get old rather quickly. What might seem new and exciting the first time you try it becomes almost rote after months of daily repetition with no change or advancement. So it went with daily play of the original Brain Age -- after spending countless days counting syllables in a sentence or counting people in an on-screen house, your synapses might fire more quickly (as the handy on-screen graph shows), but they don't fire quite as fiercely. Continuing success at Brain Age was more about muscle memory than any sort of engaging, deep thinking.

And so Brain Age 2 tries to add some longevity to the concept by tweaking the old tasks just enough to re-stretch your brain in a new direction. Instead of answering simple arithmetic problems, you now have to write the sign that completes the equation. Instead of memorizing a list of words, you have to memorize the position of numbers on a field. Instead of calculating the time difference between two clocks, you have to figure out the time shown by a rotated and/or flipped clock. There are a few wholly new concepts, such as a test that asks you to identify three simultaneously spoken words, but for the most part the skeleton of the first game's puzzles is still visible.

And, for the most part, the sequel runs into the same problem as its predecessor -- through regular daily play, the tasks quickly become so familiar as to become uninteresting. The game tries to delay this process by slowly unlocking new content only after weeks of play, but this only delays the inevitable. The daily challenges are kept minimally interesting by the desire to improve on your personal best, but the tasks are so simple that you quickly run into a ceiling of achievement that can only be improved by the luck of the draw. There's no deep strategy that will improve your ability to unscramble words, after all, so that daily graph of your progress becomes relatively stable relatively quickly. Watching your eponymous 'brain age' jump up and down from day to day is much less satisfying once you realize that any progress comes more from luck and familiarity than any real skillful strategic thinking.

Where Brain Age 2 succeeds the most is where it gives the overly basic training concepts a little more room to breathe. A piano-playing training game, for instance, starts off by leading players slowly, note-by-note, through a wide array of traditional songs, but then throws off the training wheels and asks players to tap out the song in real time. A hidden, touch-screen version of Dr. Mario similarly provides enough variety and strategy to keep your higher brain functions and your interest engaged day after day. But these gems are few and far between and aren't really enough to sustain the whole package.