One of the most addicting new additions to the Nintendo DS library is Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes A Day!, which tests your mental dexterity through a wide variety of mini-quizzes and informs you just how old (or young) your brain is feeling. Cheerleading alongside your every move is the bobbing head of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, the most enthusiastic neuroscientist you've ever met, and the man whose work was the inspiration for the title.

Lazy-brained folks don't give their gray matter enough exercise, but lucky for them, spending just a few minutes a day working out simple arithmetic problems or reading out loud will get those rusted neurons firing again.

Flip the DS sideways and the Touch Screen makes an ideal writing surface; depending on your handedness, questions appear on one side while you write the answers on the Touch Screen. Quizzes like Calculations x20 and Calculations x100 go surprisingly fast, and you get a quick assessment at the end of every quiz that compares your speed to a kind of transportation; walking speed, car speed, locomotive speed, even rocket speed!

There are two basic modes where you can train your brain, Daily Training and Brain Age Check. At first there are only three types of quizzes available in Daily Training, but if you stick to the regimen more continue to unlock. Low to High is a memory test where numbers are flashed on a grid and you have to remember the placement from lowest to highest. Head Count is a test of observation and mathematics skill, where people are constantly streaming in and out of a house party and you have to figure out how many are inside at the end. Brain Age Check includes the Calculations x20 quiz, but also has more unconventional quizzes like the Stroop Test and Word Memory. The Stroop Test flashes the name of a color on the screen, but you have to say the color of the font instead. Word Memory gives you two minutes to memorize 30 words, then you get three minutes to write down as many as you can recall.

Sometimes Dr. Kawashima's floating head asks you to draw something bizarre, like a hippopotamus or kangaroo. If there are multiple saves on one cartridge you'll get a chance to glimpse the artistic creations of your competition. There's even a graph to chart your progress in comparison to everyone else's -- four people can share one cartridge. If you're more interested in head-to-head, there's wireless DS download play for Calculation Battle x30, where up to 15 people can speed calculate in one giant math orgy.

The game has some technical problems where it sometimes cannot understand a spoken word ("blue" appeared to be especially problematic) and it had occasional problems recognizing certain numbers and letters. These technical glitches are an unfortunate blemish on what would otherwise be a near perfect pick-up-and-play puzzler.