Brain Age

How much is seven times eight? And now say it out loud into the microphone, quickly. Welcome to Brain Age, the game that in the mid-2000s turned the Nintendo DS from a children's toy into a daily ritual for adults around the world and unleashed a veritable brain-training phenomenon.

The concept is disarming. Instead of a story and enemies, you get a series of short exercises. You calculate chains of simple problems against the clock, read texts aloud, draw from memory, solve Sudoku. The game measures your performance and converts it into a so-called brain age, a number you try to push as low as possible toward the ideal twenty. It was precisely this playful metric that was the driving force of the whole game. People competed against themselves and their families, returned day after day and watched themselves improve.

Brain Age is built on a concept inspired by the work of Japanese neuroscientist Professor Ryuta Kawashima, whose stylized polygonal head guides you through the exercises and comments on your results. The game was developed and published by Nintendo and cleverly used both of the console's key features: you hold the console upright like a book, write directly on the touch screen with the stylus, and speak your answers into the microphone. Handwriting and voice recognition did misbehave at times, but even that became part of the folklore around the game.

Commercially it was one of the greatest triumphs of the era. Brain Age sold tens of millions of units around the world and, together with Nintendogs and Wii Sports, formed the holy trinity of so-called casual games that won Nintendo an entire generation. It also kicked off a wave of imitators, a genre of educational and brain-sharpening titles that flooded the stores and became a category of its own for a few years.

Is Brain Age truly science, or cleverly packaged entertainment? The debate over the real benefits of brain training continues to this day. Either way, one thing is certain: as an addictive, short and surprisingly satisfying workout for the mind, it works great even years later.

Why play: Short daily doses of arithmetic and puzzles that fit into five minutes or an hour alike. The ideal title when you want something other than action from your console and yet cannot tear yourself away.