In Austria, the Nintendo DS game Brain Age is sold as “Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Jogging” - and it quickly gained a cult-like following. The Nintendo DS is pretty expensive though…and the games should run on even the slowest 16MHZ PDA’s(Palm made those…not too long ago). Anyways, Resco recently released an ‘unofficial’ Pocket PC port…can it stack up?
BrainGain has replaced Nintendo’s male doctor with a female avatar called Sophia. It gives you instructions for the games and for using the user interface:
The ’score’ is measured via the so-called Brain Gain index…which essentially is a number ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the fitter your brain…and the harder the tasks:
The ‘tasks’ themselves are presented as small games. There are a huge variety of games available, the screenshots below show a few of the games given at “easy” level. The score is determined by correctness and speed of the answer - questions get answered by tapping the correct answer at the bottom of the screen. A list of mini games with screenshots has been requested from Resco…these will be posted as soon ad they arrive:
BrainGain supports up to four profiles. Each profile has its own index score attached - this is very handy if more than one person wants to play on one handheld:
This review looked at a release candidate of the program on a hp ipaq rx4240. The program needs about 1.6MB of memory and can be installed onto an external memory card! BrainGain supports both portrait and landscape displays…
Overall, Brain Age is a well-done package of small ‘games’ that make excellent timekillers on the go. Due to the simple controls, even people who rarely play computer games will get along with BrainGain really well. If the game really delivers on its promise to make you smarter…well, no idea. But I do have an idea about the free trial version - it is available from Resco.net and will be on the TamsShop for purchase soon!