The seemingly-contrary idea of videogame-as-educational tool has been with us for at least as long as videogames; an oddball niche for games that were, as often as not, not particularly compelling as entertainment or not particularly competent as cognitive function enhancers... but a little of both and better than the boob-tube in most cases.

Nintendo changed all that with the frightfully successful Brain Age games for Nintendo DS, appealing to a wide audience, more old and declining than young and impressionable, it seems, but thoroughly engaging nonetheless and poof: "edutainment" was in, mainstream and sure-fire, crank up the bandwagon and throw a scientific endorsement onboard -- which is exactly what Majesco has done with not one but two titles, Brain Boost Beta Wave and Brain Age Gamma Wave.

Just as Nintendo's Brain Age game had an in-game, real-world, propellerhead/neuroscientist guest-star, Ryuta Kawashima, to give it cerebral credibility, the Brain Boost games -- there are two companion titles -- similarly boast their association with right-brain training expert Makoto Shichida.

A single game, really, but available in two flavors -- Gamma Wave and Beta Wave, if you're slow on the uptake --, Brain Boost is geared toward improving concentration (registering matching objects, counting things that move about and occlude each other onscreen) and memory exercises (retaining patterns), respectively. Both feature training and challenge modes. Training lets you choose mini-games at any level of difficulty, while Challenge has you attempting the assorted mini-games at increasing levels of difficulty, threaded together with a we're-not-even-trying "story" involving interplanetary travel and... actually, just don't even ask.

The overall requirements for Challenge mode are pretty undemanding (50% rating or better to move to the next stage, which you couldn't pull off in a public school), while the whole point of the tutorial games is to play the specific games you want, and post some high scores that, with any luck, will make your friends and gaming peers feel down on themselves by comparison. Maybe they should have called this mode Brain Boast?

There are two nagging quirks to the Brain Boost games. First and notably, they use a multiple-choice answer scheme that makes both interfacing with the game easier and makes winning easier, which seems counterintuitive to the whole "edu" part of the "tainment." Speaking of easy, unlike Nintendo's Age titles, Boost doesn't penalize you for its failure to recognize your handwriting as it totally lacks a handwriting recognition feature to begin with because, you know, "easy" and all. Probably for the better, all said and done, as Brain Age's temperamental, hit and miss handwriting recognition drove some players close to madness. Still, there's a fine line between ease-of-use and totally-pointless.

Secondly (and much more to the point), the arbitrary division into the "Beta" and "Gamma" brands, with their identical, cookie-cutter "story mode" schemes, seems unnecessary, cheap and really smacks of milking the product, getting players to spend twice the money (albiet at "value" pricing) on twins that, so to speak, should not have been separated at birth in the first place.

Still, the pair of games are (arguably) geared toward self-improvement, albeit in a notably lower-tech way than the Brain Age bar would suggest. Brain Boost is a good way to spend some no-commitment, portable-'tainment time with some edu' thrown in to at least stem the tide of those otherwise ever-atrophying neural networks.