KEY POINTS:
I've a confession to make. I'm 64. Well at least I was the other week. Sad, I know.
I have since found the secret of everlasting youth - today I'm happy to announce I am only 32.
It's been a tough regime to get there but I'm happy to share
the secret.
It's called More Brain Training and is available on Nintendo DS. It is Yoga and Chi for the mind.
The game is based on the theories of a Japanese neuroscientist named Dr. Kawashima. in 2004, Dr. Kawashima's book, Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain, became an instant hit in Japan, selling millions of copies and this is the basis of the exercises. If only going to the doctor was always this fun and easy.
The remedy is just a lot of hard work intensely solving puzzles. You start by taking a series of tests and get a score that shows how old your brain is. I admit I was shocked to find how much grey matter I had and this may be a ploy to keep you playing for weeks. The number is called the DS Brain Age.
I think most people start off at a ripe old dense age of 80 and once used to the tests, youthfulness rapidly returns.
For the past few weeks, each day i grab the DS and try to improve my mental acuity and lower the "DS Brain Age" with the Brain Age Checks. You follow through your progress by graph charts and compete against others who you loan your game card to.
Here are some examples of the mental gymnastics: There's a word scrambler - you get circling letters like LMTOE and TKASS and have to work out that each spells MOTEL and TASKS.
There's a simple piano-based recital challenge and the obligatory Sudoku puzzles.
In Germ Buster, a warm-down Tetris styled game, the touch screen is full of different-coloured germs you must eradicate. Your job is to stack multicoloured medicine capsules on top of the germs, matching the colour of the capsule with the colour of the germs (for the right combination of antibiotic for the bacterial infection presumably).
Once a capsule appears on-screen, you'll use the stylus to move and rotate the capsule to a germ. When three coloured capsules are stacked on top of the same-coloured germ, the germ is dispatched! Some of these games are hard, like Finishing Position where you keep track of an ever increasingly paced sprint race.
Then there are more every-day tasks such as coin counting where the customer throws at you not just 10c 20c 50c and $1 coins, but you must give change down to the last cent! There's a truth the professor tells in the Tips section (Options) that reads "Modern life certainly does have its conveniences. Oh my, yes. But sometimes that convenience means using your prefrontal cortex less. Just think of a few modern conveniences from recent decades... I bet they are all lost chances to use your prefrontal cortex!".
Amen to that. Talk about eftpos? Those wise Japanese scientists, almost sound as crazy as MadGamer!
Honestly, this game is better than coffee at getting my brain to improve! I found this - as was the DS predecessor - hugely helpful in getting my brain roused from its dopey morning mind state.
Who would have thought older people were buying a DS so they could spend their retirement village nights keeping their brain active? It's true!
I've got more brain training to do, cya!
MadGamer rating: 9/10