New Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Age / Training Announced For 3DS

27 February 2012

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Posted by:Ferry Groenendijk

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has confirmed in an interview that there will be a new Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Age / Training game for 3DS. It’ll feature new concentration & working memory brain exercises.

So far it’s set for a Summer 2012 release in Japan. But considering the series has sold over 41.5 million copies on DS alone, it will almost certainly be released worldwide on 3DS.

To quote Mr. Iwata: “We agreed that if we were to make another game it would only be when we had some kind of special new idea for it. And for this reason, six years have passed.

However, brain science has continued to progress, and three years ago, Dr Kawashima came to me with new brain science.

1. Concentration. We now have access to information wherever and whenever we want. Since we now rely so much on these devices we might have stopped using our brains so much, lost our restraint, our ability to control ourselves and be patient. Dr Kawashima calls this ‘information addiction’.

2. Working memory. It’s the system where information that enters your brain is held temporarily as it is manipulated and used. These exercises are a serious challenge, with difficulty scaling according to player ability, and will see Dr Kawashima take the form of a demon throughout.”

The first “Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!” game that’s also known as “Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?” came out in the first year of the Nintendo DS’s release back in 2006, with a sequel following it a year later called “Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day” also known as the even longer title “More Brain Training from Dr. Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain?”. And while the series has had its spin-offs and Big Brain Academy titles in the “Touch! Generations” casual games brand, yet there has been no direct sequel for many years.

So it’s about time we get to train our brain again, this time no doubt with lots of devilishly difficult 3D puzzles!

Most recently (one year ago) Dr. Kawashima’s Body and Brain Exercises (aka Body and Brain Connection) was released for Xbox 360 Kinect. Here’s a trailer:

Read the full interview at Edge.