‘Brain Age’ keeps you thinking

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror! ”Ryuta Kawa-shima’s new game, “Brain Age,” (Nintendo for Nintendo DS, $19.95) deserves a four-star rating if only for devising a clever way to convince gamers to read aloud from dramatic passages like this one by Joseph Conrad.
To rack up top scores in “Brain Age,” he requires players also to read aloud from Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville and Jack London. These excerpts from great literature certainly are the most unusual aspect of “Brain Age.” But there’s a lot more than reading aloud in this suite of 15 minigames developed by Kawashima, who claims to be a Japanese medical researcher with a specialty in improving the functions of the human brain.
Each day, players are supposed to fire up “Brain Age” and play several games involving math, vocabulary, short-term memory and critical thinking. Some days that involves reading aloud. Other days, it’s a Sudoku puzzle or rapid-fire math problems.

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