More Brain Training from Dr. Kawashima was released in the UK in June 2007, a year after its predecessor, and followed it to the top of the individual formats chart either side of Christmas amidst a Nintendo advertising blitz. As well as a success for a strategy of reaching for wider audiences, it was a last blast from a disappearing time. The DS was the only one of the major formats without online capabilities. In his post on Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training, Iain commented on how “it doesn’t ask you to connect to an online service or tweet about your progress to leverage some sort of network effect”. Its offline nature also had implications for the form of its sequel.
In the US, this game was called Brain Age 2, but the British (and Japanese) title’s use of More in place of a new number is more honest. It has a set of new games, giving the chance to work out the correct change in pounds and pence, play rock-paper-scissors or do some anagrams. But everything else around it is essentially identical, down to all the specific sayings of Dr. Kawashima. Not surprising when there were only six months between the two games’ release dates in Japan in 2005. It’s a new set of levels released as a new game, in the absence of the ability to download or even to install, an Oh No! More Lemmings for brain training. The popularity of expanded special edition rereleases would live on and indeed expand, but the standalone level pack model was pretty much done. One more way that the DS was successfully not following the crowd.
Since it’s more of the same, I’m not going to go back over the core experience much. Instead I will focus on one game on More Brain Training which has changed even less, and which Iain didn’t cover in the previous post. Just like the original, More Brain Training has a sudoku mode, with a new set of sudoku puzzles. It doesn’t tie in to any of the calculations of brain age, which makes more sense on learning that sudoku wasn’t even in the original Japanese release (it was eventually added in 2009 after the DSi gave the DS download capabilities). Sudoku is on the main menu, but it just sits there as a sequence of numbers on grids to work through. It wasn’t the part that the TV adverts with Terry Wogan and Ronan Keating and Nicole Kidman focused on, but it was important enough to keep around for the expansion.
Sudoku on Brain Training is also really well executed. I was familiar with the concept or filling in a grid such that each square, column and row has all the different numbers from 1 to 9 but had never regularly played it, but it was easy to quickly see the appeal. Zooming in and out to get to specific spaces works. The occasionally dodgy handwriting recognition (fine, I’ll add a curly tail to my 9s if you insist) is at its least noticeable and least consequential. Being able to fill in different numbers in the corners of each square when narrowing down the possibilities is a great idea. The fact that you can then simply erase them afterwards and return to neatness gives it a clear advantage over doing sudoku on paper. It was not the best use of sudoku on the DS (it was no 9 Persons 9 Hours 9 Doors, but then that wasn’t even released here) but it was a big and strong one.
The sudoku also points towards where, outside of video games, the game’s model of sequel was still working. People were buying sudoku books, and then buying more of them for a new set of puzzles afterwards, and didn’t need the game to have grown new rules in the meantime. It could just be… more. More sudoku was in especially high demand in the UK. Having gained popularity and its name in Japan in the ‘80s, the game first made it into the UK papers at the end of 2004. By July 2005 (three months after the UK release of the DS and a year before that of the first Brain Training), Sky One had a live sudoku TV show hosted by Carol Vorderman. Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year for 2005 had as its mystery guest from the news a woman with the name Sue Doku. It was a cultural phenomenon. Brain Training and More Brain Training were not just sudoku, but the bits that were followed the lineage of successful Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? video games in capturing their moment. It was both a serendipitous bit of timing and a masterful bit of localisation.
Top of the charts for week ending 22 December 2007:
Top of the charts for week ending 5 January 2008:
