Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day may not be coming out for another week, but the reviews and feature stories are rolling in. Here's a round-up of a few you may have missed:

Brain Age is a good game, but it's not an amazing one. I'm not exactly doing back flips over it, but I always have the desire to reach for it every day. It has a special addictive quality, and the inclusion of Sudoku pushes it to must buy status.
Game Daily
Score: 4/5

The big flaw in Brain Age is its reliance on speech recognition and handwriting recognition. In each exercise, I lost points and time because, in a few instances, although I wrote or spoke the correct answer, the DS misinterpreted it as a wrong response, or else couldn't decipher it at all.

Then there are those patronizing messages, accompanied by a creepy bobbing image of Dr. Kawashima's head. He makes lame jokes about the weather, advises you to eat lots of carbohydrates and tells you that "your brain is rippling with raw brainy power." At one point, he lets me know that "the setting sun sure does put spots in my eyes." Huh?

Brain Age is fun and invigorating. I'm just not sure it'll return the brains of boomers to the pristine condition they exhibited before all that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
The Wall Street Journal
Score: None

Brain Age is a decently amusing distraction, but without the fun and variation of the minigames found in Big Brain Academy and with many questions about the actual impact the training has on your brain, its tough to recommend the software too highly. For $20 most gamers will probably get their money's worth however - especially thanks to the robust Sudoku collection.
Modojo
Score: 3/5

My son is torpedoing my intelligence.

This may sound like the idle claims of a dim-witted father, the inept machinations of someone desperate for an excuse, but I've got proof.

I've been messing around with Nintendo's next big thing: a game—more of a program, really—designed to track and beef up your intellect in just minutes a day.

Brain Age, a monster hit in Japan, goes on sale here April 17 for about $20.

I've been following the prescribed course, doing my three exercises daily, but my score keeps getting worse. Or to be blunt, I keep getting less intelligent.
Rocky Mountain News
Grade: B

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