Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! Review

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(More customer reviews)The first Brain Age on the Nintendo DS spawned a whole generation of brain training games. Now they're back with Brain Age 2 - and I really feel they did a great job of enhancing the game's functionality!

First, the infamous "voice test". In Brain Age 1, it was the classic see-a-colored-word-say-the-color game that so many magazines and websites print. The big problem there was that blue and black always got confused. With this one, they changed it to rock-paper-scizzors. It's just as challenging, and we've never had any problems with it understanding us. Hurrah!

Next, the mini-games. I appreciated the challenge of the Brain Age 1 games, but they were pretty boring. They just weren't much fun to play, especially compared to some of the other games on the market.

They did a great job of revamping the games in Brain Age 2. Some of them are still on the boring side, like the 'running people' game where you try to figure out what place the dark player comes in. Most of them, though, are truly fun to play. The spinning letters game where you try to figure out what word they spell can be quite challenging. I love the piano game where you try to play along with the song.

There are the usual graphing options, so you can see your progress over time, and then the "brain age" with an ideal age of 20. Just like with the first game, I have to protest that it's a silly idea that your brain is best at 20. Your brain can easily be very slow at 20 and much better at 30! They should rate it as a 0% to 100%, rather than pushing this idea that youth is best. What's next, a diet program that gets you to weigh the weight of an "ideal 20 year old"?

Still, it is certainly valid that the more you use your brain, the better it gets. Everyone needs to keep their brains exercised and fresh. Playing this game is far better than sitting back and passively watching TV all night. Best of all, you can bring this along with you and increase your brain power while you ride the bus, wait in line, and do other boring tasks!

Highly recommended!

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Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day Review

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(More customer reviews)Flash Focus is an eye-training game which helps you improve your peripheral vision, eye reaction time and other eye related functions. It is similar to many actual eye-training exercises used by optometrists.

Set up much like the Brain Age series, each player creates a profile. There are daily activities you perform to improve your skills, and then you do a series of tests to determine your "eye age". Your aim is to hit 20 years old, representing a young, healthy pair of eyes.

The tests cover a range of eye activities. There is the peripheral vision test, where you focus on a central spot but have to see the items around that. There are quick moving tests where you have to track a fast-moving object and remember where it ends up. There are reflex type activities where you stylus-click on objects, hit a moving baseball, swat at a ping pong ball. The more activities you work through, the more training session styles you unlock.

I definitely see the value of these activities, and like that it tracks your progress over time. However, I have the same complaint with this game as I do with Brain Age - and you would think that by now they would have fixed these issues.

First, the "discussion" involved with each game is maddeningly repetitive and annoying. You have to page through every single prompt. Surely by now they should have a "discussion off" option in the options menu!

Next, when they kick you up to hard, you don't get any credit in the tracking system. So if you go from easy games to hard games, and don't do 100% on the hard games, they berate you for being less good even though you are now MORE good, i.e. beating harder tests. If the point of the game is to improve your skill and to be tracked in that improvement, they should track it properly.

Finally, I am all for concentrating on the main task at hand, but some of the graphics here really could use a designer's touch. Remember, this is a VISION game!! The whole point is how things look! I think about how gorgeous Plankton looked, and that game was a very simple game. Just a basic overhaul like that could move this game from looking like it was made by 3rd graders to making it a game that's a true visual feast. They just didn't bother.

Well recommended for its practical eye enhancement features - but I really hope someday that a person with a clue about game design takes over the Brain Age group and overhauls these games with some basic but much needed upgrades.

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Product Description:
You've trained your brain with Brain Age--now sharpen your eye power with Flash Focus! Fast, fun activities and quick-play sports games give your eyes the challenging workout they need.
Boost your eye power!Train your eyes with quick, fun activities based on vision training programs used by top athletes.
Put your eyes to the real-world test! Take a swing at a speeding pitch, outmaneuver incoming linebackers, and strike the soccer ball into the goal in fun sports-based minigames.
Pick up and play every day! Complete your daily training activities to challenge your Hand-Eye Coordination, Peripheral Vision, Dynamic Visual Acuity, Momentary Vision, and Eye Movement, then track your results with a calendar and easy-to-understand charts

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Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm not entirely sure whether I can call a game like Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day a video game. Its graphics are hardly groundbreaking, its audios are almost monotonous, and its core gameplay involves reading aloud, counting syllables and solving mathematical problems. Surely, that's not what video gaming is all about, is it? Well, not if you hail from the Nintendo school of gaming, no. As mundane as Brain Age sounds, it's actually strangely addictive, and once you begin your journey of improving your brain age, you'll find yourself deeply immersed in the various activities aimed at giving your brain a daily workout.

The primary objective of Brain Age is to "exercise your brain". This is done through doing activities that are designed to stimulate your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that influences how you apply what you've learnt (whatever). It's believed that doing these activities on a regular basis will have a positive effect on your brain. Whether or not this holds any truth, I'm not sure. But with 15 activities to choose from, at least the game can keep you occupied for quite a while, even though some of these activities are less desirable to do than others.

Some of these activities include a calculation game, which puts you through a series of simple mathematical problems. 2+6, anyone? Or 8x7, for that matter? Well, you get the picture. The idea is basically to get the brain to start thinking quickly with a succession of simple questions, instead of forcing the player to spend too much time dwelling on one. There're different variations of this calculation module, but the underlying gameplay doesn't divert from the idea of rapidly solving a problem.

Reading aloud is another activity in Brain Age. Obviously, this makes use of the DS' mic, and it basically requires you to read through an article as quickly as possible. While you may have problems pronouncing words like "epoch", you can actually breeze through this activity by simply bulldozing through without pronouncing the words properly. Just remember to wipe the saliva off your DS screens. Syllables counting is another mini-game on Brain Age. This one requires you to count the number of syllables in a short sentence, and then write the answer down on the touch screen. If you're not exactly sure about what is a "syllable", just remember that the word "syllable" itself has three syllables, and you should be fine.

Of course, there're more to just calculation, reading aloud, or counting syllables in Brain Age, but as you can see, the activities in the game are not exactly the "saving the world from an evil force" kind. Yet, the game's appeal comes in the form of its simplicity. At times, when playing this game, I feel like I'm doing one of those online IQ tests, and the eagerness to score well is impetus enough for me to keep going despite the dryness of the questions. This basically sums up the charm of Brain Age.

To spice things up a little, Brain Age also included a substantial amount of Sudoku puzzles. Now, if you can believe my wife, Sudoku is the best thing on Earth since sliced bread. The popularity of this grid-based puzzle game is immense, and it's not surprising to see it being included in the game. As with the usual Sudoku books, the Sudoku puzzles in Brain Age are sorted according to difficulty. The easy ones are, well, pretty easy to solve, while the advanced ones require more logical thinking. Anyhow, Brain Age contains more than 100 Sudoku puzzles, which should keep fans of Sudoku occupied for quite some time. Having Sudoku as one of the 15 activities in Brain Age basically provides additional value for an already value-for-money budget game.

And, to top it up, Brain Age also has a multiplayer mode, which allows you to host up to an amazing 15 players with one cartridge. Unfortunately, the only playable activity in this mode is the calculation module, which lets you take on others in 30 mathematics questions. This gets old really quickly. It'd be fun if you can challenge your friends to a game of Sudoku (duh!), really.

Brain Age also requires a unique way of playing. You play it with the DS being held vertically, much like reading a book, with the touch screen on the right. The concept is to recreate the scenario of solving puzzles in a puzzle book, and to a certain extent, this blends in very nicely with the objective of the game. And, true to the game's out-of-the-box nature, Brain Age is played entirely with the DS' features. That is, via the touch screen and the mic. These make the game more "book-like" than the usual DS games. The game also caters to left-handers. If you're a leftie like me, simply tell the game so, and you can turn the DS "the other way round" so that the touch screen switches to the left. This is a nice touch, or the game may just lose a lot of potential buyers!

The problem with how the game plays, however, lies in the sensitivity of the touch screen and the mic. Somehow, it seems to have problem registering my pronunciation of "black", and doesn't really recognize my "8" on the touch screen properly. As a result, I've an initial brain age of 76 (!) because of unnecessary errors. It appears that players will need to adapt to how the game receives input to do well in their own results. This is not exactly a big issue, but it could be frustrating when you're trying to beat a certain timing, only to be let down by your poor handwriting or diction.

In conclusion, Brain Age is a very different sort of game, even by the DS' selection of quirky titles. It may not boast the usual features that sell a video game, but in their place, we've something that is simple, unassuming, and ultimately very addictive. Moreover, the game is supposed to improve the functionality of your brain, so what's there to lose? Brain Age is highly recommended.

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Product Description:
Activities include quickly solving simple math problems & counting people going in and out of a house simultaneously.

Draw pictures on the Touch Screen, or read classic literature out loud.

Play Sudoku, the popular number puzzle game.

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