BrainAge posts(Subscribe to this feed)

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in the world of gaming it often comes across as a slap in the face. Let us distinguish between inspiration and outright mimicry. It's not at all uncommon for a good game to have strong roots in a previously-released title. Descendants of popular titles are acceptable and standard, as many early popular arcade games including Galaxian and Centipede were heavily based on the groundbreaking Space Invaders. Even the industry-revolutionizing Super Mario Bros can be seen as the prototype for nearly every side-scrolling game since, itself having traces of Pitfall.

But in order to avoid being a cheap imitation, the inspired game must expand upon or branch the formula in a new direction. Before its release, the excellent Banjo-Kazooie was seen by some gaming journalists as nothing more than a Super Mario 64 clone. In hindsight, that's an amazingly foolish indictment. But there's the trick: while they do share similarities, they are very different games. Banjo-Kazooie did what a good game inspired by another should do: use a solid foundation and build upon it. Some titles, like Best of Tests DS, takes the solid Brain Age foundation, but instead cuts it open and squeezes lemon juice inside.

No BAFTA game awards this fall? How can this be? The last two years, Nintendo has picked up a few awards and a little bit of sweet, sweet recognition, and we're not sure we want to face a 2008 without the same treatment. The British awards, which lauded Wii Sports in 2007 and Electroplankton and Brain Age in 2006, suffered some problems last year and will be postponed until 2009. Due to the awards' schedule, games that weren't yet released or finished were being considered, and one of the games up for an award last year ultimately wasn't released in 2007. Sounds like the changes are necessary, but an award-free year is a sad proposition indeed.

Maybe they'll make it up to us next year.

Despite a handful of 'me too' cash grabs for Sony's portable, exercising gray matter has been the domain of the Nintendo DS. However, Plato Learning, an e-learning company based out of Minnesota, has hatched a plan to bring educational games to the PSP beginning sometime in April.

The games, part of the company's existing Achieve Now line of educational products, will be targeted at helping elementary and middle school students "meet high academic standards and improve academic proficiency" in areas such as language, reading, and math. The project could potentially bring as many as 57 different educational titles to the PSP, but will the games give players an inferiority complex by telling them they think with an addled brain of someone twice their age? For now, this too remains Nintendo's exclusive domain.

[Via PSP Fanboy]

Here's a cheap, easy costume you can whip up for your next Halloween/convention/boxart-head meetup -- dress up as Dr. Kawashima's disembodied head! Here's all you need:

• some white posterboard
• a pair of scissors
• a sharpie marker
• a pair of glasses
• an aging Asian man

Flickr user ClockworkGrue spotted this character last weekend at WonderCon 2008. Girls must have swooned over it, as there are lipstick kiss marks all around the Brain Age mascot. Why else do you think he goes around calling himself LL Cool K (Ladies Love Cool Kawashima)? Step past the break for more video game related costumers spotted at Wondercon 2008.

Bringing an old story back to the forefront with a new angle, BBC show Watchdog reports that Michelle Livesey of Manchester can't get Brain Training (Brain Age in the States) to recognize her saying "yellow" -- she's apparently not saying it "posh" enough. Although Watchdog added a new dimension with Brain Training's inability to recognize yellow, the original problem color blue is also in the mix. The issue is all in the accents.

According to Nintendo, on page 47 of the Brain Training manual it gives hints on how to use the voice recognition properly. Suggestion number four is: "Pronounce each word as clearly as possible, and try to avoid using strong dialects or accents." Just check out Nicole Kidman saying scissors in a Nintendo ad to see how things could go wrong with accents. Nintendo claims it has been continually monitoring the voice recognition efficiency in its software since the game launched in June '06. We believe them, just as long as we don't have to say the color blue, or yellow if we're from Manchester.

The Brain Training series of DS games has been incredibly profitable all across the globe, with 17 million titles sold worldwide. But Dr. Kawashima -- the floating head mascot and brilliant mind behind the series -- doesn't care about the money. In fact, he has refused to take any royalties from the games at all, proudly boasting that "not a single yen has gone in my pocket."

The series' DS royalties alone are over 2.4 billion yen -- about 22 million dollars USD -- half of which Kawashima is entitled to (the other half going to Tohoku University, his employer). Rather than taking the money, Kawashima is content to support his family of four with his own wages, which are around $100,000 USD.

A self-declared workaholic, Dr. Kawashima has dedicated his life to his research into the aging of human brain, which was the genesis of the Brain Training games. We're happy you like your job so much, but don't you think your wife and four sons could benefit from a bit of that brain money?

Best Buy is having a sale on all of their video games priced at $19.99, allowing those looking to stock up on titles to snag two games for the sum of $30. And, looking over the list of titles that qualify, there's quite a bit of fun to be had.

Notable games in the sale include Nintendo's training titles Brain Age, Brain Age 2 and Flash Focus. There are also other games like WordJong, SimCity DS, Spectrobes and Orcs & Elves up for grabs too.

[Via QJ]

Sales data for the year have come in regarding the UK and Nintendo's brain-empowering software on the DS ranked pretty darn high on the list. Both Dr Kawashima's Brain Training and More Brain Training from Dr. Kawashima were on the list, with the first title only being beaten by FIFA 08. You folks in the UK really love your soccer football, eh?

The full list is as follows:

1. FIFA 08 (EA)
2. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training (Nintendo)
3. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision)
4. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (Konami)
5. More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima (Nintendo)
6. Halo 3 (Microsoft)
7. The Simpsons Game (EA)
8. Wii Play (Nintendo)
9. Assassin's Creed (Ubisoft)
10. WWE Smackdown VS Raw 2008 (THQ)

[Via Joystiq]

Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.

The titling of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as we didn't start this column until early July, so it's more of a "half-year of" piece. No, you jerks, the humor in us beginning our Promotional Consideration retrospective on a disappointing note isn't lost on us.

Still, with 26 articles now behind us, one every week since this feature's inception, we've written enough of these to develop a few that are actually worth reading. We've picked out our five favorite Promotional Consideration posts of 2007, carefully hiding them after the post break, that magical realm where anything seems possible.

Floating head doctor Ryuta Kawashima has once again been called upon to lend his expertise and disembodied features to a brain training game, this time for mobile phones. CVG reports that Namco Bandai's Brain Coach with Dr. Kawashima will use a "scientifically proven series of fun brain training challenges" to exercise and activate several parts of your brain, most likely the ones that shut down whn u rite a txt msg to ur palz.

Brain Coach has only been announced for Japan so far, but given the popular trend kicked off by Nintendo's Brain Training and its intelligent ilk (almost all of it featuring Kawashima), it's unlikely to stay there for very long. Kawashima's constant presence in the genre practically makes him the mental Madden.

Looks like Nicole Kidman's European campaign for More Brain Training is still going strong -- at least, in the city of Dordrecht in South Holland. Even through the reflection of the train station on the glass, her concentration is clear ... but hey, she's got to get that brain age down somehow.

Head over to Flickr to see Arjan in't Veld's full-sized picture, and feel free to let us know when you start seeing Patrick Stewart pop up everywhere on behalf of the DS. There can never be enough Patrick Stewart!

You may notice a little bit more swagger in our writing style-- it's the confidence that comes from having a youthful, energetic brain. Yes, we've been playing Brain Age 2, tapping on piano keys and unscrambling words and remembering big groups of numbers with the best of them.

One thing that bothers us a bit about Brain Age and its sequel is the daily-play design. Sometimes we like that we can fit a satisfying gaming experience into just a few minutes, but sometimes we have two hours to kill playing games, and we want to play Brain Age. While you can train all you want, you can only make so much "progress" in one day, due to artificial constraints. If one can even be said to make progress in a nontraditional game like Brain Age, that is.

What about you? Do you like it when games feed you pre-measured portions of game time? Or do you really hate running out of stuff to do?

No, really, let's talk about whatever you want. It's Sunday, and for those of us in the U.S., it's a holiday weekend, so it's a good time to relax and discuss ... whatever. Like online petitions, for instance -- we get a lot of those. Do you guys believe they can ever do any good? We don't have to be serious, either. Doing much gaming this weekend, or spending the time outside? Anyone else getting tired of the heat and feel the urge to just stay in side and raise that brain age? Or, if you're in the mood to make requests, let us know what we're not talking about enough.

Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.

Those of you lucky enough to live in a city with a rapid transit system have likely seen at least one ad for a handheld game during your commutes. After all, what better audience to advertise a portable title to than people who're trapped in a high-speed steel car full of strangers while they wait to be ferried from one spot to another?

In honor of Brain Age 2's release in the states last week, we'll be looking at a few ads we found for Nintendo's educational software that've appeared in transit stations in countries like Canada and France. Join us past the post break for this week's edition of Promotional Consideration.

Even the best games sometimes have flaws, though we often gloss over them when trying to sell our friends on our favorites. But today is a day for honesty (because, uh, we said so), so we thought we might discuss those flies in the ointment. From issues with "blue" in Brain Age to Trauma Center adding even more difficulty when arbitrarily deciding you've done something wrong, we've seen dark spots in even the best of what the DS has to offer. Of course, that leads to another question: could that explain why, despite all of the great games on our favorite handheld, the reviews often seem a little lower, on average, than games for other systems? Or is there another reason that you suspect?