Welcome to Modojo, 
Brain Age 2: A Family Review
Written by Chris Goldberg on Monday, October 22, 2007
Chris Goldberg gets personal, and gives his whole family an opportunity to weigh in on Nintendo's latest non-game....
...Continued From Page 1 The Family
The obvious first choice for this review was my close family. Of them, I managed to get my sister, mother, aunt and my little cousin to join in. Both of them had a scattered history of gaming, but almost never play except when I invite them to. Recently with the Wii and DS, they have begun to turn on consoles a bit more and even occasionally purchase a piece of software for themselves. They are best described as borderline non-gamers, or extremely light casual gamers.
(Cynthia, Brain Age 70 and Betty, Brain Age 80)
(Yours Truly, Brain Age 31)
(Vanessa, Brain Age 62 and her sons Ruben, Cisco, Brain Age 80, and Gabriel)
Train your Brains in minutes a day...
My [Chris Goldberg]'s Point of View -
Objectively, Brain Age 2 does a lot of things right for the type of videogame it is. It offers a nice variety of word, math and memory problems and throws other unique spins on the training angle like Piano Player. It compels you to continue coming back to improve your brain and training scores, which reflects the sort of oldschool zen feeling of besting your score from the arcades. It also offers a few modes geared directly at the core gamer, including an excellent Dr. Mario clone called Virus Buster and over 300 Soduku problems. For some, this is worth the twenty dollar price of admission alone.
Generally speaking, hand and voice recognition works fairly well and is a major improvement over the original, with a few caveats. During the rock-paper-scissors game where you had to say one of those words out loud, the game simply refused to consistently accept the word "Scissors." Trying out multiple strategies, from speaking loud to speaking soft, from speaking near and far, in a near endless variety of tones and accents, it seemed this was not the best test for the DS microphone. While it would not shock me if a gamer picked this up and happened to have the "magic voice" that clicked with this title, I could not get it to work even close to fifty percent of the time.
Handwriting seems to work the majority of the time, although it too had some minor problems. Specifically, certain games seemed to have different standards for accepting letters like "B" and "K", and while it was far better than the voice recognition, it still managed to have an acceptance rate of eighty percent in the sample I took. Since this game relies on these mistakes (and your speed) to determine if your brain age has improved for the day, this can potentially be something that frustrates a lot of individuals who feel it is not their fault for not scoring as highly as they might have.
Ultimately, from a personal perspective this is a title that simply does not ring deeply with me. I'm constantly thinking how I could play any number of free word or math problems online, and that edutainment was never something I actively wanted to buy for my videogame consoles in the first place. I barely cared for it in school, as well as I performed when I had to do them. On top of that, while the game has some of the foundations of a classic score grabbing arcade game, it prohibits that sort of feverish play by only being able to record your results once per day. This decision is clearly a deliberate design choice, and it may be one that my mother appreciates, but it inherently limits its appeal for me. Is that the type of software I want to help make a success? Answering this is where rating a game like Brain Age 2 becomes difficult. If I did not enjoy myself, would it be fair to the reader to suggest I had? At the same time, the game is not squarely aimed at me... and this is where I kept running into problems. Fortunately, my perspecitve is only one of many.
[2 out of 5]
