Previews

Hands on with Professor Kawashiwa's Brain Training

The burning question of the day: how old is Pocket Gamer's brain?

Hands on with Professor Kawashiwa's Brain Training

We were pleasantly surprised on playing Professor Kawashiwa's Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? at the Game Developers Conference last week.

To be honest, we were a bit sceptical about a game that was expressly designed to help pensioners keep their marbles dust free; mental arithmetic and word memory tasks don't sound like much fun. But after a couple of days on the Professor's workout, we changed our mind. Maybe we're getting smarter?

The core of the game is pretty simple. Every day, you're given a 10-minute mental workout. This consists of three mini-games randomly chosen from a collection including maths problems, a tricky word memory game, a connection maze, and vocal tasks including one where you have to say the colour of various words into the DS' microphone (the so-called Stroop test).

The game always asks if you're in a place where you can freely talk and selects the mini-games based on that, so your fellow tube travellers aren't disturbed (any more than usual, at least). And as you play, more complex games are unlocked, so you don't just improve by learning all the words you're supposed to be remembering through repetition.

Once your workout is completed, the Professor calculates your brain age, which is based on the speed and accuracy with which you carried out the tasks, and each day a graph is plotted so you can see your improvement. The youngest, and hence best, brain age you can reach is 20 (a harsh score for the teenagers among us!)

Check out the screenshots for more insights into the brain tests. As you can see, we're showing different screenshots top and bottom, since the game plays with you holding your DS like a book. (This makes it a pain to display the screens in our usual thin format, but we're sure you're clever enough to work out what's going on.)

Professor Kawashiwa's Brain Training also includes a practice area where you can work on the mini-tasks for as long as you want and record high scores (though these won't be taken into account when calculating your brain age). There's a sudoku mode too, featuring over 100 different puzzles. As you can imagine, the DS' touchscreen really comes into its own here.

So things are looking good for the Professor. We'll be pushing our grey cells hard over the next couple of weeks, before delivering the definitive Pocket Gamer review of Professor Kawashiwa's Brain Training in a dramatic pupil-turned-tester role reversal.

As for the state of the Pocket Gamer brain… keep an eye on the blog for a graph showing our extraordinary improvement. Next stop: 50!

Professor Kawashiwa's Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? is due for release on the 19th May.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.