Typically, I wouldn't expect to enjoy a "game" that kicks off with diagrams showing brain activity in a person sitting around or watching television and an instruction manual that includes bar charts. Typically. But nothing about Brain Age is typical.

Nintendo's smash hit in Japan comes to the U.S. on April 17, but I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a final retail build of the game.

I spent good chunks of the day playing it and find it a delightful collection of brain teasers, memorization and brain grunt work.
When you first turn the game on you see that the image has been turned sideways on both screens, so you have to hold the DS like a book to play it.

The initial screen has the floating head of professor Kawashima on the right side and four options on the left. You can choose Quick Play, Daily Training, Sudoku and Download. Quick Play lets you hop in to a quick demo of a game that doesn't count toward your Brain Age, Download lets you play one of the mini-games against others wirelessly or send a demo of the game to a friend's DS. Sudoku (which I'll get to later) is a full blown Sudoku game. Daily Training is where you are likely to spend most of your time.

The first time through Daily Training you are asked to sign your name and enter some personal info. After that your Brain Training stats are saved in your file.

The left screen in Daily Training is taken up with a Calendar that has stamps to connote o on which days you were training. The right screen lets you run a quick Brain Age Check, train, graph or change up options.

The whole concept behind Brain Age is pretty fascinating. Professor Ryuta Kawashima says that you have to work out your brain on a daily basis like you work out your muscles. This is done by doing the type of thinking that increases blood flow to specific parts of your brain.

Once you play through some of the games, Brain Age rates how old your brain is. The older the worse, the younger the better. The youngest you can score is 20.

Kawashima said he determined brain age comparisons by taking a sample of 120 people and having them run tests and then charting their scores.

The idea of Brain Age is that by playing a little bit each day you will improve your Brain Age. And that's really Brain Age's only fault, it's not meant to be played adnauseum.

Brain Age is best when taken in small doses, like a half dozen games at a time. The professor even recommends only playing in the morning for a little bit each day.

The games you play vary from memorizing words and hand writing them down, to memorizing numbers, doing math or reading out loud. Each game takes less then a few minutes.

In one game I played, I watched as a set of number popped up along with an equation. I then had to solve the problem. I ended doing 20 in a few minutes.

In another I had to read several pages of Thomas Paine's The American Crisis out loud. At one point the game asked me to draw pictures of Australia and a koala.

But after going through the four available games, I was sort of out of things to do.

I love Brain Age, but it seems to be something designed for playing five minutes at a time.

Fortunately, the U.S. version of the game has a neat Sudoku game built into it as well. It may seem like Nintendo is just trying to hop onto a Sudoku bandwagon with this game's inclusion, but it's very well put together and comes with 1,000 puzzles broken down into difficulty.

Playing Sudoku on the DS is very intuitive. You start with the typical grid and tap on a particular cell to zoom in. Once the cell is taking up the touchscreen, you just write in the number. Voila.
I did have a wee bit of problem with the game misunderstanding my really bad handwriting at times. In both number and letter games, there were a couple of times where the game misread what I wrote.
It hasn't happened enough to be really annoying, but if it became a regular issue, it would drive me nuts.

Overall, I found Brain Age to be a fun bit of mental floss, something that you could use to keep your intellectual edge without having to do things like, I don't know, read a book.

I'd recommend buying this game to anyone who has a DS and might even recommend buying a DS just to play it.