Since The Daily Orange made the move to a tabloid-sized paper, it’s been close to impossible to fold it in such a way that allows you to do your daily Sudoku without attracting the attention of professors.

Nintendo has solved that.

‘Brain Age,’ the new brain-training game for the Nintendo DS, not only includes hundreds of different Sudoku puzzles, but it also claims to make players smarter and sharper in the process.

The game’s features are based on research by the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima. Kawashima’s brain training method works on the notion that if the brain is tested often enough with math problems and memory games, its ‘age’ will reduce to normal. A lazy brain supposedly ages much faster than an active brain.

‘Brain Age’ begins by testing your current brain age through a simple test: color recognition. The screen will show colored words, but it’s the player’s task to name the color of the letters, not to say the word. ‘Brain Age’s’ speech recognition software isn’t perfect, but it’s accurate enough to get players through the game as long as the user speaks loudly and clearly into the DS’s built-in microphone.

Once the game determines your brain’s age – which usually ends up to be much older than expected – you move on to daily training, which includes solving simple math problems in rapid succession and various exercises to test memory. The DS’s stylus is used to write in the answers on the touch screen, but like the voice recognition, the software often confuses characters, resulting in incorrect answers.

As the gamer progresses through training, ‘Brain Age’ tracks your brain’s progress with charts and graphs to show how much it has developed. For best results, the manual recommends going through the exercises once a day, but the outcome seems to be based more on how much time you spend with the game, not how accurately you solve the problems.

One of the more promising features of ‘Brain Age’ is the multiplayer. With only one game pack, up to 16 players can race each other to complete Sudoku puzzles and math problems. Let’s see a newspaper beat that one.

As far as the single player game goes, it becomes tedious to keep up with the daily brain training and answer the same simple math problems again and again. If you’re not a math whiz or obsessive compulsive, this game gets old very fast. At least you’ll never run out of Sudokus.

Published on April 23, 2006 at 12:00 pm