Video game review by ERIK LEIJON

Sometimes I hear the line “the game wasn’t made for you.” It’s a potential loophole to avoid any criticism from stodgy vet gamers, since it’s easy to say a game is designed for another crowd and hardcore gamers need not apply.

But if movie fans can have diverse palates, so should video game players. Brain Age (Nintendo DS/Nintendo, Nintendo) is a cultural phenomenon with gamers and non-gamers in Japan, and is tailor-made for those who wouldn’t be able to pick out a DS from a graphic calculator.

I’ve read and heard in other publications that Brain Age is being played by everyone—from grandmas to businessmen—looking to give their brain a workout. Brain Age is like any good exercise plan; it’s a daily dose of math problems, memory games and reading tools that’s supposed to take a few minutes a day. Your results in these games are then saved and your progress is chronicled on graphs. Your “brain age” is what you are striving to drop—age 20 is considered to be the ideal one for your cranium.

But again, the game isn’t made for me, so I enlisted the one person who wouldn’t be impressed by some newfangled toy: my mother. While her final comment was, “I wouldn’t spend $150 on it,” she more enjoyed fighting with the game than learning from it. The game is surprisingly allo/francophone unfriendly, and the game had difficulty understanding my Mexican mother’s pronunciation of “black” and “blue” during the original brain test, and gave her an unfair score of 76. Determined to prove the game and Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima (the game’s only character) wrong, she moved on to the math problems (her strength).

That turned out just as badly, as the game did not recognize the way she drew the numbers, even though visually they were correct. For Québécois, the game will mark your sevens as wrong if you put the customary line through it. Also, if English is not your first language, the syllable game might be tougher than it’s supposed to be, and you might be disappointed with your reading score.

Acting in a Machiavellian manner, it took a few minutes to find loopholes that augmented my score but defeated the purpose of the game. You don’t actually have to read the text exercises, and there’s ample time to write down the words in the memory game. Meanwhile, glitches in the game will also hurt your score, since the microphone and stylus pad are prone to errors, especially when things speed up.

Brain Age is a great idea since it fits a genre that doesn’t, but should, exist. It doesn’t require a huge time investment, but rather just about 10–15 minutes a day. Although the game isn’t “made” for me, playing and attempting to stimulate my catatonic brain was a welcome change from the usual. Brain Age is a good pick-up for DS owners, but wait until Nintendo releases a sequel that fixes these quirks if you don’t have a DS. Since this game has cross-cultural potential, there should also be versions in other languages.

Too far?

While Brain Age may win the hearts of non-gamers, Super Columbine Massacre RPG does little to dispel the image of all games being violent bloodbaths. Due to the massive popularity of the game, the official site took the link down, but at presstime it was available

on Rapidshare at http://rapidshare.de/files/20704452/

ColumbineRPG.zip.html, and you should find it on any P2P network (search columbineRPG.zip).

The game is a black humour take on the Colorado high school shootings of 1999. It’s graphically poor, but has some sharp dialogue and a great MIDI soundtrack with Nirvana, Manson, Pumpkins, etc.