Nintendo DS's mid-life facelift

LIGHT, white, and the screen's very bright. That sums up the differences between the new Nintendo DS Lite handheld games console and its older sibling, the DS, which launched here early last year.

"There is increasing evidence that keeping your mind active seems to be a prevention for progressing towards Alzheimer's."

I launched into the game's preliminary brain age check, where my partner expected me to register in the under-five category.

Happily, or so I thought, the game marked me as having an 80-year-old brain. Sadly, this turned out to be not so good, with a brain age of 20 being ideal. I put my score down to a big dose of the flu and too many cold tablets.

The game uses a mix of speech recognition through the DS's built-in mike and character recognition through the Nintendo's touchscreen for inputting answers to the exercises, which include mental arithmetic, number games, Sudoku puzzles and word games.

A daily dose of brain training earns you a stamp on your log book and opens up fresh puzzles.

Since speed is part of the exercise, it pays to think fast and write slowly because the recognition software can get confused by scrawled script and mark correct answers as wrong.

For those whose brain cells could do with a daily jog, a copy of Brain Training could be as motivating as a new pair of Nikes.