Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!

Brain Age asks the question "Is your brain young or old?" It's one of the most iconic games on the DS, partly due to Nintendo's massive advertising campaign trying to tout the console (and this game) as a device for casual users outside of the traditional video gaming audience. It's also infamous for its easily-exploitable text recognition system.

There's some sounds from this game in the Wii Photo Channel for some reason.

This page or section needs more images. There's a whole lotta words here, but not enough pictures. Please fix this. Specifically: Unused graphics Regional differences

Build Date#

Present in the root directory is file version.txt, which contains a date in YYMMDD format and a time in the USA, Europe and USA Revision 1 versions. The date is in an unknown format in the Korean version. It doesn't exist in the Japanese, Europe demo or Australia demo versions. The file is loaded on boot.

060207
11:32

060320
18:29

060628
17:47

12/06
21:50

Regional Differences#

Title Screen#

Japan	South Korea
America	Europe

All non-Japanese versions of Brain Age feature an additional Sudoku mode that was absent in the original Japanese version. The gigaleak contains an internal interview with Satoru Iwata explaining that the inclusion of Sudoku was to make the game more appealing to a western audience:

"On the other hand, I felt that the fact that Dr. Kawashima's books were well known in Japan, but not in the U.S., was a big handicap, and I had been thinking about ways to solve this problem. Then, about six months ago, I received a report from the NOE, and about two months ago from the NOA, about the recent popularity of a game called "Sudoku". I heard that in the U.S., there is even a corner for it in bookstores. I wondered if I could make good use of this. First of all, I conducted an experiment with Professor Kawashima to see if Sudoku could really activate the brain, and the results were very impressive. Dr. Kawashima said, "It's an excellent tool for brain activation," and the experimental results showed that it was even more effective than other training methods, so he had no reservations about Sudoku being integrated with this software."