Brain Age remains Nintendos top selling DS title and continues to dominate the charts today, selling as many copies as the New Super Mario Bros. and if not even more. As those of you who have played the first game will know, Brain Age or Dr Kawashimas Brain Training is a title aimed at preventing brain degeneration as a person gets older by running the player through a series of simple exercises such as small arithmetic sums. It claims that it may even make you smarter. Following the success of the first title amongst both young and old people alike, Nintendo releases the second title, Touhoku Daigaku Mirai Kagaku Gijutsu Kyoudou Kenkyuu Centre, Kawashima Ryuuta Kyouju Kanshuu: Motto Nou wo Kitaeru Otona no DS Training, literally translating to More DS Brain Training for Adults, Supervised by Professor Ryuuta Kawashima from Tohoku Universitys New Industry Creation Hatchery Centre. The original Japanese name for the first title wasnt any shorter but from this point on, I will refer to this sequel as Brain Age 2.

As with the prequel, Brain Age 2 greets you with a 3D representation of Dr. Kawashimas head but this time, there are a few extra notes at the opening tone to signify the new version of the title. Apart from the absence of Sudoku that was present in the Western versions of Brain Age, your choices are very similar to the first with Quick Play (Trial) at the top followed by Daily Training and Download Play. Selecting Daily Training means you again have the choice of selecting either one of four different files to register your details. Again, as with the prequel, the Professor will run you through a test to determine your current brain age, asking you to subtract the same number from a given number repeatedly if you choose not to use the microphone. For example, if youre asked to deduct the number 9 from 121, the answers you would have to write would be 112, 103, 94, 85, 76 etc.


Play some music on the virtual piano.
More is the keyword in this sequel with a total of 15 different exercises compared to 9 in the first and they are all new. For those who first register, there are a total of 5 exercises available for your brain right from the start. This consists of one where you must convert words in Kana (the Japanese alphabet) to Kanji (imported Chinese characters), filling in the arithmetic sign for sums, playing tunes on a marked out virtual piano, tracking the position of a runner in a race and some Japanese to English translation. I find all of them to be much more interesting and difficult than the first Brain Age which involved doing sums mostly at the early stages.

Due to the difficult nature of memorising and making use of Kanji even for natives, its not surprising that almost half of the other unlockable exercises are based on writing out more of the characters. Players will find themselves trying to figure out what Kanji the given Radicals form, spotting the Kanji thats changed in a small sentence, filling in 4 Kanji proverbs and writing out what day it is. JLPT level one or two should allow you to get through some of the exercises.