Dr Kawashima's Brain Training for Nintendo Switch review: entertaining and useful - but doesn't live up to the original game

With many of us looking set to reluctantly spend more time at home in the coming weeks and months due to the coronavirus pandemic, one Nintendo Switch game I have been reviewing might just come into its own.

Video game fans - and even those who aren't frequent gamers - will remember Nintendo's famous Brain Training games.

Who is Dr Kawashima?

Brain Age, also known as Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, is a series of video games developed and published by Nintendo, based on the work of Japanese neuroscientist, Ryuta Kawashima.

But for those who are perhaps not as familiar, Brain Training presents you set of mini games that are designed to help improve your mental processes, strength and agility.

The activities were designed by Dr Kawashima, with the idea of stimulating multiple parts of the brain and therefore help improve the gamer's abilities while also combatting normal aging affects on your noggin. Activities are generally based on two or more mental stimuli, and are to be completed as fast and as correctly as possible.

For example, common activities include calculations - where the user is presented with a list of single-operator math operations and must utilise the system's touch screen to write their answer to each question - and a Stroop Test, based on the Stroop effect, where players must say into the unit's microphone the color of the text of a color name that appears on screen.

New features

It is very much more of the same in the Nintendo's new Brain Training title for the Switch, titled Dr Kawashima's Brain Training for Nintendo Switch.

The game uses some of the new features of the Switch (including the gyroscope and infrared camera in the Joy-Con units) as part of the input into the activities, alongside other returning training activities. A Switch-compatible stylus is also available in some regions and online to support some of those activities, including scribbling answers in the quick-fire maths equations section.

Brain Training was a worldwide phenomenon, selling 33 million units globally. It effectively made the Nintendo DS, as people who had never had any interest in video games suddenly rushed out to get one just to play Brain Training.

Now, in these troubled times, it could be just what we need to keep our brains ticking and occupied when the boredom of potential quarantine and lockdown kicks in.