NINTENDO DS Dr KAWASHIMA'S MORE BRAIN TRAINING HOW OLD IS YOUR BRAIN? GAME

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BRAIN TRAINING

HOW OLD IS YOUR BRAIN?

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MORE BRAIN TRAINING FROM DR KAWASHIMA: HOW OLD IS YOUR BRAIN?

Dr. Kawashima's back with more cranial crunching, but is it a no-brainer purchase second time around?

Just because your brain is tucked out of sight under your hair, it doesn't mean you can neglect it, getting all flabby and useless, lolling limply around your skull as age and alcohol abuse take their toll. Imagine if Sylar from Heroes lopped off the top of your bonce: what would he find there? A decrepit tangle of fagged-out ganglions, or a lean, mean, thinking machine? If it's the latter, chances are you've already been playing the original Brain Training

on the DS. Of course, that means you're likely gagging for something a little more challenging, which is precisely why Japanese neurologist Dr Kawashima has devised this sequel. That and the fact Nintendo wants to flog another 10 trillion copies to mums and grannies everywhere, no doubt.

It probably won't come as too much of a surprise to note that this follow-up operates firmly in the realm of 'If it ain't broke"¦' territory. True, it's packed with new exercises, a whole slew of brand new Sudoku puzzles and a mildly more engaging multiplayer mode but, ultimately, this is Brain Training with knobs on. As before, things kick off with your inaugural Brain Age Check. Here, you get your first glimpse of the new challenges. For instance, Rock, Paper, Scissors - designed to assess your ability to think on the fly - has you saying either "Rock", "Paper" or "Scissors" into the DS microphone, prompted by the picture and instruction that appears on the left-hand screen.

At first you only have three training exercises available (Missing Symbols, Masterpiece Recital and Word Scramble), with a total of 17 to unlock by collecting date stamps on your calendar at the end of each training session. You can only record one result for each exercise per day, so there's no chance of cheating and getting all your stamps in one go. As before, it's all been carefully constructed to limit your daily play time and keep interest levels up over an extended period - there's no chance of going crazy and becoming Einstein over one wild weekend of cranial cramming.

All training exercises on offer are the usual mixture of word and number puzzles, ranging from the maddeningly difficult Word Blend - where you write down the words that you hear spoken by up to three people simultaneously - to the addictive and very practical Correct Change, in which you have to calculate how much change to give a mythical customer and then select the correct combination of coins using the stylus.

In fact, part of Brain Training's evolution here is the greater focus on more familiar everyday activities, offering challenges which genuinely feel like they might have a practical effect on your day-to-day life. There's also the overall sense of more meat on the challenges you undertake, with exercises like the aforementioned Word Blend proving far tougher than even the original game's more mind-boggling tasks. This increase in difficulty serves the dual purpose of satisfying punters who feel like they've thoroughly expanded their brain power following the first game, while also increasing that sense of satisfaction once mastery is finally yours.

There's also a greater emphasis on communal play here too. We particularly like the alternate take on picture task challenges of yore. Intermittently, you're given a series of dots and asked to join them up with lines as you see fit, forming an object of your choice. If you've got multiple players using the same cartridge, you get to see what everyone else has created and it's frequently a fascinating and somewhat disturbing trek into their psyche - particularly when what you saw as a perfectly reasonable teapot is interpreted as a razor-toothed, snarling creature from the pits of hell. Throw in a slightly expanded single-cart multiplayer mode, featuring a more diverse array of challenges than the original's slightly tedious maths quiz, and it really does seem like a more social product.

Obviously, a significant part of the first game's meteoric success was its elegantly simplistic interface, spurning any complex button pressing in favour of largely intuitive handwriting and voice recognition support - in other words, it was so simple an OAP could fathom it. Veteran brain trainers will be aware of the kinks in both systems though and it's pleasing to see that Nintendo has fixed some of the more glaring issues this time. For a start, there's none of that "Blue - BLUE - BLUUUUUUUUUUUE!" malarkey, forcing you to change pitch like the world's giddiest diva. Likewise, handwriting recognition seems a little more robust, although you'll still find yourself switching between lower case and upper case characters to avoid interpretation glitches, threatening your faultless challenge run.

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