Author Topic: Brain Age 2 Review  (Read 4911 times)

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Offline Patchkid15

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Brain Age 2 Review
« on: October 30, 2007, 02:05:15 PM »
This is what i used for my Staff news writer review.

Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day.
Same Old Game, Little Variation, Have Fun…

Doctor Ryuta Kawashima returns for another Brain Age game in a vein attempt to teach the youth of America. Yes it may help some learn a thing or two about the piano but nothing to much. The game consists of training games which are explained by none other than Dr. Kawashima. All of it make for an enjoyable experience but nothing too spectacular.

You begin the game taking your Brain Age for the very first time, this is one of many things that you are supposed to do daily. The lowest age you can get is 20 years, but you most likely will not score to close to that for some time. After completing you Brain Age you can take part in some brain training games. At this point in the game only 3 are available, eventually you will obtain 11 games in all. Which include Piano Player, Change Maker, Math Recall and many more. And of course like in the original Brain Age you get a stamp for each day you partake in a Training game. The more stamps you have the more games you can unlock.

For collecting stamps you also unlock other options in the game, which add changes to the training games or unlock other options. An example of an option is the ability to design you own stamp. You choose which form you would like to use and you draw using of course the stylus. If you don’t like what you drew you can always reset it to the default, which is a circle branded with the letters OK. AS for more options in the training games you can get things like the ability to choose your own song to play in Piano Player. This is of course after you have played the daily song which is pre-selected for you.

One of the other big parts of the game is the up and rising puzzle game Sudoku. They put much effort into this part of the game because it has its own heading in the main page. You are allowed to choose your own difficulty, which is limited to the basic Easy, Medium and Hard. There are even tutorials if you don’t quite understand how to place the numbers 1-9 in the correct spots. If you have ever played Sudoku you will find this as one of the most addicting parts of the game.

The game is also has a built-in quick-play mode which Dr. Kawashima tells you is for “Introducing the game to family and Friends” Other then this you can use it to quickly play a round of Sudoku or a training game. One of the other aspects of the game which is very nice is its communications section. Every day the good doctor has something for you to do, whether it be identifying a picture that someone else drew while playing the game, or filling in the words to an acrostic. These can sometimes be very enjoyable.

The game also has a built in Single-card play and a Multicard-play. Up to 16 individuals can play together. This mode is nice but it would have even been nicer if Nintendo included a complete Wi-Fi mode, which you could use to play others across the internet.



Score:
Graphics      Sound        Control        Gameplay        Lastability       Final
   8.0                7.5               7.5                  6.0                     5.0                6.5

Pros
+ Games are designed nicely
+ Stylus movements are read nicely
+ Voice recognition is good
+ Sudoku what else can I say
Cons
- Game gets boring after 2-3 weeks of play
- No Wi-Fi mode
- Stylus movements do not always work well.

Graphics – Because this is a simple brain training game the graphics are limited. But for what’s there it is pretty nice. Not many objects are blocky and everything fits together nicely

Sound – Many different tunes are played in this game and especially a lot in the Piano playing game. Heck, even its own song made it into Super Smash Bros. Brawl. But still they aren’t amazing.

Control – Yes the game reads your movements most of the time but it doesn’t all the time. For instance I can write one thing and write the same thing a moment later and two different answers will appear. You also have to do many things in one stroke which is not the way most people write. But overall you get used to how its reads things after some time.

Gameplay – As for gameplay, everything is nice. The training games are simple enough for many people to enjoy, but super high scores are near impossible to obtain. Good luck on getting that Rocket Speed.

Lastability – One of the games worst factors. It gets boring because you do the same exact thing day after day after day. One of the only things that really change is the Piano player music.

Final – I felt it wasn’t a great game but just a recreation of the first game with some added games and features. Nothing spectacular was added, but still was an enjoyable experience.

Offline Kairon

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RE: Brain Age 2 Review
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2007, 05:39:42 PM »
Dang, I really want to get this game sometimes... unfortunately because of all the Holiday craziness it's fallen off of my list, but I think I'll definitely pick it up in a couple of months. The game's actually worth it just for Sudoku, but the math elements are what really sell me. Nothing's more intense than trying to speed through simple math questions!
Carmine Red, Associate Editor

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Sega and her Mashiro.

Offline Khushrenada

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RE:Brain Age 2 Review
« Reply #2 on: October 31, 2007, 06:52:12 PM »
This is quite different from the review I gave it. *cough* Shameless Plug *cough*

I think the game play experience of Brain Age really improves when you have more than one person using the same card. It adds more competition and more surprises. Seeing some of the other pictures people would draw in the first game or even some of the acrostic phrases people write can be very hilarious. I also thought that there was more variety to the activities and so it seemed like you were really testing out many different areas of the Brain compared to the first game. I'm surprised you didn't mention the virus busting game either as I think that adds more appeal to the game as well.

Oh and Kairon, for what it's worth, Math is no longer the majority of the games activities. Although you may need to so some math in some of the games, I think only 3 are really just math based alone although I'm just going off the top of my head here on that number. But I still recommend it because the game does have many new and fresh activities. The only weird thing is that the Sudoku puzzles are a bit unbalanced. There's 3 pages of intermediate puzzles but barely 2 pages of advanced puzzles. I don't why they did it this way considering Brain Age 1 had a fairly equal number of puzzles for all 3 difficulty levels.
Whoever said, "Cheaters never win" must've never met Khushrenada.