Can you beef up your brain with video games?

'Brain Age' rides again
Alan Averill, the location writer and editor working on the American version "Brain Age 2," says Nintendo spent a lot of time trying to make the first game accessible to all sorts of people. And that effort has paid off. Nintendo has had a great deal of success recently drawing in older gamers, non gamers and lapsed gamers and "Brain Age" has been a big part of that.

This summer Nintendo launches two new entries into the brain-training phenomenon it created. And judging from what I've seen, it continues to own this genre.

Though "Brain Age 2" doesn't arrive in stores until August 20 ^th, Averill gave me a sneak peak at what's to come. And it appears that "Brain Age 2" will look and feel very much like the original, with the jolly, floating head of Kawashima himself again acting as the game's chatty guide. Even the spare, simple graphics look the same.

However, "Brain Age 2" will offer some 15 new quizzes and activities to train and test our brains on. Among them: "Piano Player" in which you must tap notes on a keyboard while keeping up with a cursor moving over a sheet music, and "Word Scramble" in which you unscramble letters to determine the word they spell.

Averill says Nintendo has also improved "Brain Age 2's" handwriting and voice recognition, the latter of which will be used in the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" exercise (look at a picture of a hand in the rock, paper or scissors shape and then speak the symbol that either beats it or loses to it).

It's this kind of innovative way of interacting with these games that makes Nintendo's brain training titles so outstanding. Just check out the company's other summer trainer — "Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree." The lighter, more fanciful brother to "Brain Age," "Big Brain Academy" first appeared on the DS and has now been excellently reinterpreted for the Wii.

Here, the Wii's motion sensitive controller becomes the perfect tool for taking quizzes that are supposed to measure the weight of your brain (bigger is better in this totally unscientific test).

After you enroll in the academy, the cartoony Dr. Lobe runs you through tests in five categories: identify, memorize, analyze, compute and visualize. Aim the controller at the screen and pop numbered balloons from lowest to highest. Use the controller to place missing pieces into a puzzle. Hold the controller to your ear like a telephone and listen as a voice calls in food orders that you must memorize.

The challenges are light and breezy and especially fun when played in one of the three multiplayer modes (Mental Marathon, Mind Sprint and Brain Quiz). With friends around, I found that this brain training game doubles as a killer party game. In fact, I was having so much fun, I almost didn't mind that Dr. Lobe weighed my brain in at a paltry 923 grams.

Not for the neophyte
Among the crowd of brain- training imitators "Practical Intelligence Quotient 2" for the PSP stands out as a unique entry. But while most other brain games tend to appeal to a broad audience, "PQ2" is not for the neophyte.

There are no simple math problems to solve or word games to play at. There are no balloons to shoot and you'll find no cartoony figures cracking corny jokes about the temperature, weight or age of your brain. No, "PQ2" takes itself seriously (note the austere graphics and the cool, clean techno music) and it offers up some seriously brain-bending puzzles.

Like the original "Practical Intelligence Quotient," "PQ2's" puzzles take the shape of three-dimensional mazes (more than 200 of them). Inside the maze, you must maneuver your avatar from point A to point B in as few moves as possible and as quickly as possible. But since your avatar can only step up and down one level, you'll have to figure out how to get over and around obstacles by moving various boxes, manipulating pressure pads and using teleportation portals, among other things.

"PQ2" claims that your ability to solve these puzzles tests your logic skills and says something about your ability to apply your intelligence in real world scenarios. It gives you a score not unlike a standard IQ test with an average score being 100.

What I think this game really says about me is that if I was a rat in a maze I'd never find my way to the cheese. I'm embarrassed to report that "PQ2" ranked me at a below average 80.

But even if "PQ2" gave me a low score, I'll give it a high one. Not only does this game have several different testing modes (a 100 Puzzle Test, a Quick Test and various Theme Tests) what makes "PQ2" especially cool is that it allows players to create their own 3D puzzles to share with other players.

And as poorly as I ranked, the more I played it the better I did. After a few rounds of "PQ2," I  made my way up to a hard-earned and not-so-humiliating score of 103. In "Hot Brain," I warmed my way up to Red Hot ranking of 83 degrees. And after playing "Big Brain Academy" a few times, I managed to weigh in at 1030 grams.

Whether these games are bulking up my brain…who knows. Still though, it's nice to feel a little bit smarter than when I started.

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