Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day (Nintendo DS, 2006)

Pros: This is one of the coolest ideas I have seen on any gaming system. Its designed to activate a fairly important area of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. That area of the brain is primarily responsible for deciding between correct/incorrect and desirable/undesirable choices. The more you train with this product, the more efficient this area of your brain becomes at performing these evaluations! Talk about a life-hack.

Cons: Its not really a *game*, per say. Its a training device. Think of it as a gym for your brain. But unlike a gym, it only targets one general area in particular. What about other useful brain areas? Finally, bad handwriting will throw off your scores. That is frustrating. I don't know how it mistakes my 1s for 5s... grrrr. I have also heard that it doesn't recognize the spoken word "blue" very good, but I have only had a problem with that maybe twice.