Hobbies And Interests
Brain Age
"Brain Age" was developed for the Nintendo DS system, a dual-screen handheld console that has allowed developers to pursue innovative game concepts. In "Brain Age," you use a plastic pen called a stylus, rather than traditional handheld console controls. The stylus lets you select options and write directly onto the screen, where the game can recognize numbers and shapes and respond accordingly. "Brain Age" is a game of mental agility, challenging your skills in logic, math and memory. The developers claim that playing the game just minutes a day will sharpen your mental agility, and if that's not enough, it has 100 built-in Sudoku puzzles.
Tetris
"Tetris" involves falling blocks or different shapes that you must quickly rotate and drop into spaces at the bottom of the screen. In the early 1990s, professor of psychology Richard Haier did a study on the mental effects of "Tetris" on game players. He tracked cerebral glucose metabolic rates in player's brains to show how much energy the brain was consuming, roughly demonstrating how much work the brain is doing. Haier determined that at the end of a month, gamers' glucose levels had decreased while their performance had increased. Tetris uses increasing rates of speed to ease players out of their comfort zone, forcing you to think more quickly identifying shapes and making logic and problem-solving decisions. There is a version of "Tetris" for nearly every video game console ever made, and it is still being produced over a decade after the original.
Dr. Mario
Similar to "Tetris," "Dr. Mario" is another game that relies heavily on reflexively identifying colors and shapes at increasing speeds. The goal of the game is to drop like-colored pills on top of colored viruses; stack three in a row, and the virus is defeated. The game becomes complicated when you have additional leftover colors remaining that have to be eliminated by stacking more pills either vertically or horizontally to put four colors in a row. This game relies heavily on hand-eye coordination, especially in the later stages, as well as logic and puzzle solving. The multiplayer mode is even trickier--combos will drop colors onto the opposing player's screen, sometimes right on top of pill stacks you were attempting to get rid of. Originally released on the original NES system, a new version is available to download on the Nintendo Wii.