Pros: Entertaining, makes you flex your brain, great fun for families to compare scores and pictures.
Cons: Only four can have profiles, voice and touch screen issues.
The bottom line: I definitely recommend for anyone looking for a DS cartridge that's fun and challenging and isn't "just" a game.
How old is your brain? If you’re anything like me, some mornings find you feeling about a thousand years old. So I wasn’t surprised when my first go with Brain Age showed my poor brain at a rather tired 65 years old (I’m 42). It’s not that I’m not smart. It’s that I’m not FAST.

Or I wasn’t, to be more accurate.

Within a matter of weeks, I was coming in at 20 (ideal) and 21 years old. I was computing faster, counting quicker, and doing a better job of evaluating situations, and all it took was a few minutes of training and testing a day. Is it a miracle?

No, I don’t think so.

Brain Age consists of a series of tasks designed to sharpen your thinking and beef up your brain. As training progresses, additional tasks are “unlocked” or added for your enjoyment (or horror!). What sort of tasks are we talking about? Here’s a sampling:

Calculations x 20--simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication (up to 9x9) problems. The point, of course, is to complete these 20 math problems as quickly (and accurately) as possible by using the DS stylus to write the answer on the touch screen. It’s harder than it sounds—the brain does try to seize up.

Calculations x 100--like above, but 100 problems. As you advance through training, a “hard” option unlocks, adding simple division problems to the mix.

Reading Aloud--this one is fun—it’s reading aloud from various bits of classic text (think Melville, Hawthorne, Bronte, Thoreau, etc) as quickly as you can while remaining understandable AND retaining comprehension.

Number Cruncher--ohhh, this one breaks my head! It starts out simply—numbers in multiple colors appear on the screen and you’re asked how many of one or another color or number are there. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It is—until the numbers start sliding, flashing, and bouncing about.

The Stroop Test--I remember this one from college, and it made my head throb then, too. The names of colors flash before your eyes in different colors, i.e., red might be black, blue might be yellow, etc. When the word flashes on the screen, you’re to say clearly which COLOR it is (not which WORD it is). This one has proven to be a BIG problem, as I’ll explain soon.

Word Memorization--this one is surprisingly tough! A list of 30 four letter words show up on both screens for 2 minutes. During that two minutes, you do whatever tricks and memorization games necessary to remember as many as possible. When time is up, the screen goes blank and you’re given 3 minutes to recall and write down (on the touch screen) as many as you remember.

Head Count--here’s one to make your head cramp just a little. You’re shown a number of “people.” Then a house drops down over them (putting them IN the house), and you’re treated to people entering and leaving the house. Your job is to keep track of how many are still IN the house. I can usually handle this one, though now I’ve been given the option of training on the new “hard” setting. Just think people flying in the back, out the front, AND in and out the CHIMNEY. Ohhh, my brain.

Those aren’t all the training programs, but they give you an excellent idea of how things work and what is expected of you.

Another daily activity is drawing from memory—the game presents you with three items to draw from memory (say a bulldog, King Tut, and a paramecium). This is great fun—not only do you get to compare your pictures to those stored in the program (professionally done, mine don’t compare), you can also compare your pictures to those drawn by others who are also using Brain Age. With my husband and son also using Brain Age every day (four users can maintain profiles at one time), we’ve had some great laughs over our pictures (I still think my shark ROCKED!).

After training each day, you enter your “stamp” for the day—think gold stars from back in grammar school. After a few weeks of training, the game “unlocks” the stamp, allowing you to design your own special stamp.

If you don't want to train daily or don't wish to maintain a profile, there's a "Quick Play" option where the tests can be taken without a score being saved.

In addition to daily training and daily testing (training and testing scores can only be registered once a day, though you can train and test as many times as you want), the game occasionally asks you to answer questions like “what did you eat for dinner last night” or “what’s the first thing you did when you woke up this morning.” Days later, the game will toss that back up, asking you what you had for breakfast all those days ago.

Training and testing aside, Brain Age also offers Sudoku puzzles, which have always made my hands shake and my eyes bleed. However, unlike the paper versions, Brain Age offers up very basic puzzles (in addition to the tougher ones) and gives you the option of choosing to be informed when you’ve made a mistake. Five mistakes=failure. I’ve found that, with these kinder, gentler procedures, I can actually finish a Sudoku puzzle. In fact, I’ve finished seven so far!

Now, as I stated above, I started out at 65 years old. This morning I scored at 22 years old. What’s up with that?

Well, to be honest, I think this is at least as much “learning to the test” as it is improved cognitive function. As I train every day, I’m learning how to better take those tests. Does this translate to improved cognition in general? Not if my brain farts and bad typing are any guide. I’m still a ditz, I’m just a ditz who’s mastered the testing. Mostly.

Do I have any complaints? Ohhhh, yes. I have complaints that can, at times, be heard shouted to the heavens. What are they?

• The Voice Recognition Software! Ohhhh, come on! What is wrong with the way I say “blue?” It’s “bloo,” I say it the same way my husband and my son say it, yet the program will not recognize my “blues” until I repeat them three or four times (which really does a number on test scores). My son has the same problem with “red.” This makes the Stroop Test a horror for us.

• The Touch-Screen! This game refuses to recognize my "8"s. Usually. Not always. Sometimes it decides that my "8"s are actually 13s. Or 17s. Again, this does a real number on scores. There are tricks, ways of writing that often (though not always) get past these little peccadilloes, but when you’re 87 into what looks to be a record breaking “calculations x 100,” a misinterpreted number can be good for a terrific screaming fit. My husband swears by his little pocket stylus (I don’t know why he has a pocket stylus), but I haven’t noticed a difference.

In all, I’ve found Brain Age (which was a gift to me . . . to be played on my ten year old’s DS) to be great fun. Sure, it’s frustrating, and it can make your brain hurt, but it does challenge, entertain, and maybe, just maybe, it makes you just a little quicker on the uptake. One terrific bonus? While it’s not intended for kids (it’s not "inappropriate," it just won’t give an accurate “brain age”), my son is hooked. He trains every day, eagerly. Think about that—he’s eagerly leaping into multiplication and division problems. He’s eagerly reading complicated passages from classics. He is the MASTER of the “people coming out of the chimney” training (that thwarts his mommy and daddy every time). Even if I weren’t enjoying this (and I am—it’s a family activity and we have great fun), I’d recommend it just because it can help get kids interested in math and reading. And hey, my boy has gone from a brain age of 80 to a brain age of 40 (he’s not discouraged, knows that these scores are aimed at adults). Take it from the 42 year old woman--40 ain’t so bad.