Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! | 
| From: Nintendo
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $13.57
You Save: $6.42 (32%)
New (50) Used (16) from $9.40
Rating:  101 reviews
Sales Rank: 49
Platform: Nintendo Ds
Genre: puzzle games
ESRB: Everyone
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 4.9 x 0.4
MPN: MOREBRAINTRAIN
UPC: 045496739010
EAN: 0045496739010
ASIN: B000QUYHIK
Release Date: August 20, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | New Activities! The title is a series of minigames designed to give your brain a workout. The 17 new, engaging activities are all designed to help work your brain and increase blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. Whether you're playing simple songs on a piano keyboard or monitoring the photo finish of a footrace, you'll love your new mental workout! | | • | Keep training! When you start a new game, you will take a series of tests and get a score that shows how old your brain is. This number is called your Brain Age. With daily training over weeks and months, you can improve your mental acuity and lower your Brain Age. Progress is charted in graph form. | | • | Expanded multiplayer! You can keep up to four save files on one game card. Share a game allows you to compete in a picture-drawing quiz or an acrostic challenge with family and friends. You can also use DS Download Play to send a demo to friends or compete with up to 16 players in one of four fun modes. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Life is a game. It's full of challenges and adversities, expected and unexpected. Happiness is derived from how well you play it. Play it you must or else your brain, your mind can wander to a state of opaqueness. Brain Age 2 is the sequel of the game that challenged players to transcend beyond their mind's borders. New challenges await. How far can you go? What's your Brain Age?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 96 more reviews...
 Great Brain Training for All Ages August 28, 2007
Lisa Shea
114 out of 118 found this review helpful
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!
 Better Than The Original! Improved Game Play!! August 26, 2007
A. Stagg (Virgnia, USA)
57 out of 59 found this review helpful
I have to say I like Brain Age 2 more than I liked the original. I found the first version of the game frustrating (yet still engaging) because the handwriting recognition and voice recognition to be problematic.
This new version seems to have improved immensely. I see a few reviews here inidcating that some users are having problems with voice recognition, but that's not what I am experiencing with the game. The Rock, Paper, Scissors game is working flawlessly for me, unless I stutter, stammer, or someone says something in the background. I especially like that the game requires you to answer with EITHER a correct or incorrect answer! Furthermore, I have absolutely awful handwriting, yet the game is doing an excellent job recognizing my chicken scratch!
Best of all, the game is addictive and has me playing constantly. I'm a fan of games like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy where you ultimately compete against yourself to improve your score (or compete against others if you are so inclined). There are enough challenging mini-games (including sudoku) to keep the game interesting for quite awhile. It is certainly worth the price!
However, it would be a mistake to believe these games are any REAL indication of innate cognitive skill and performance. The game claims to help make your brain more agile and that may be possible. Research is, in fact, showing the benefits for people to continue to solve puzzles, read, and perform other complex cognitive tasks to stave off the effects of mental aging and even help recovery from brain injury. I think Brain Age will improve mental agility, but players should not be discouraged if their initial scores are not high. This is a GAME first and foremost, not an IQ test. Play it and enjoy it!! If your brain becomes more efficient at processing information consider it a bonus of playing a very enjoyable game.
 Still the best Sudoku game for DS, but too much Dr. K. November 8, 2007
Bobby W. (USA)
24 out of 24 found this review helpful
Brain Age 2, like the original Brain Age, is still the best Sudoku game available on the Nintendo DS. It makes excellent use of both screens (no wasted space or tiny, hard to see numbers that plague other "dedicated" Sudoku games on the DS). As I said in my review of the original Brain Age, I wish Nintendo would come out with a dedicated Sudoku game on the DS using this layout. They could rake in a lot of extra cash.
As far as the "main event", I pretty much agree with what the other reviewers have posted here.
I haven't unlocked all of the games yet, but so far, "Word Scramble" is my favorite.
Some of the new games are improved variations of the original games. "Memory Sprint", where you try to keep track of what place a race runner is in, is more fun than the original game of counting how many people go into and out of a house.
I also like the "Change Maker" and "Sign Finder" games, because they provide some real world practice, although some people may find them boring, or too much like homework.
The "Piano Player" game was a disappointment, because everybody here seemed to be talking it up, including keyboard players, and that's a bit scary because this type of "follow the bouncing ball" music game is available on just about any cheap electronic keyboard out there.
The "Word Blend" game is lost on me - you do need to concentrate to separate the simultaneously spoken words, but it seems to ultimately be a test of one's hearing (and patience).
My major gripes with the Brain Age series are:
1. Like other reviewers have said, the "scoring" implies that a younger brain must be better than an older brain. This is misleading and insulting. If Dr. Kawashima had a hand in this aspect of the game design, well, he needs to grow up a bit.
2. There's too much Dr. Kawashima! Even in "Quick Play" mode, there's "too much fuss" to paraphrase the good Doctor. I don't want to have to tap past the same screens of the Doctor telling me what's good for my brain umpteen times. I just want to play the dang game!
Still, there are worse ways to blow a few idle minutes every day than playing games like Brain Age.
Brain-Twisting Fun August 20, 2007
Michael Kerner (Brooklyn, New York U.S.A.)
21 out of 26 found this review helpful
Last year, gamers really started to go wild for the Nintendo DS all over again. Not just because of the DS which was redesigned into the DS Lite, but a whole new era of mental challenge games attracted new gamers young and old. Mainly, with Brain Age, the Nintendo DS got older gamers into the scheme of gaming and excitement from verbal memory games, to introducing Su Doku, the challenging puzzle game that have really made gamers go wild. Unfortunately, there have been many knockoffs to Brain Age like Mind Quiz for the PSP, that really haven't delivered and attracted the feeling that Brain Age delivered. Now, a sequel to the original mind bender that started it all, returns to the Nintendo DS, but is it good as it was before, or falls short on memory?
Brain Age 2 for the Nintendo DS tackles on more exciting puzzles than before. The gameplay is expanded nicely, but there are also a lot of changes to the gameplay here in the game. The first main change is that a lot of the verbal games like the color strooping exam were removed, because there were a lot of problems with the microphone use in the game. Instead, there are a lot more games that feed off nicely from Nintendo's other DS mind-bender Big Brain Academy here, where you have to comprehend how much you have to give back as change in dollars and cents, to memorizing a song on a piano. Another new game is called word wheel, where you have a series of letters spinning around, and you have to fill in the exact word, one letter at a time. There are also a few things that have returned here, including the picture drawing challenges, but especially the Su Doku puzzles, withe over 100 new puzzles to test your mind. The graphics are just as simple as they were before, but the gameplay is just even more addictive than it has been before, and the control also handles that just as well.
All in all, with so many mental games in the video game market right now, Brain Age 2 really does deliver nicely for the Nintendo DS. If you haven't tackled the challenges before, you may want a new mind-reading workout. I loved the original one, and I really like the new addictive challenges. I absolutely suggest you buy this sequel, and keep that brain sharp.
Graphics: B
Sound: B 1/2+
Control: B+
Fun & Enjoyment: B+
Overall: B+
More of the same, and that's not a bad thing August 25, 2007
N. Durham (Philadelphia, PA)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
Brain Age 2 offers more of the same this time around, and if you played the original, surprise smash hit for the DS, then you'll know that this isn't a bad thing. Brain Age 2 supplies just what the cover of the box says it does: it's more training for your brain. The game is easy to get into for newcomers and veterans alike thanks to offering the same, simple structure as before while offering new takes on the mini-games themselves. Combine that with some solid multiplayer capabilities, more great sudoku, and much more complicated math problems; and Brain Age 2 ends up being a winner. The biggest flaw of Brain Age 2 however remains left over from the first game: the handwriting and speech recognition features are still somewhat shaky. That aside though, Brain Age 2 succeeds by following the same formula as before: addictive gameplay, clean presentation, and a budget price; and in those departments alone, Brain Age 2 is worth checking out.
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