Review: Brain Age
The promise of intelligence is an appealing one to me. Brain Age tests you on your puzzle solving skills and rates your intelligence.
Brain Age is a game that took Japan by storm. I can understand why. Doctor Kawashima welcomes me every day and laments my absence when I miss a day. He entertains me with his over-the-top facial expressions and urges me on when I do poorly. I actually look forward to doing my “training†every day.
This game has such a strong Japanese feel to it. Doctor Kawashima is shamed when I do poorly and hangs his head. He gets so excited when I do well. He waits patiently while I decide what I’m going to do. I love it when he says, “Well aren’t you a trooper coming by every day like this!†He says it every day I come in, but I still like to see it.
People LOVE this game so much that they actually take pictures of their accomplishments. You can see their drawings on this Flickr Group:
Flickr: The Brain Age Drawings Pool
Seeing these pictures makes me feel sad that I haven’t taken pictures of my own Brain Age Drawings. I am so proud of myself when it tells me my Brain Age is younger than my actual age. At one point, it said that my Brain Age was 70 years old. I was screaming at it. Mike came into the room to see what was the matter. I told him that my game was stupid and it was broken. I pushed the next button and it seems that Doctor Kawashima was playing a joke on me. Really my Brain Age was 26 years old and he had miscalculated. Doctor Kawashima, he’s a joker.
Whether this game really makes me smarter is debatable. I KNOW it makes me better at solving the kinds of puzzles in Brain Age, but whether it really is keeping my brain young remains to be seen. I bet there are behavioral scientists somewhere in the U.S. testing just that.
Tune in Monday to see my review of Big Brain Academy, its American counterpart.