I'm cheap. I love a bargain. I love video games. And I have a short attention span. Brain Age 2 + Bill Lynch's Mistress = a perfect match. So while I was wandering around downtown Toronto late one night, I just happened to walk by one of those big box electronics retailers open past 9pm AND I happened to have 20 bones I was itching to spend on something.

Brain Age (the first version) has been one of my favourite DS titles for a while now. I keep coming back to it when I'm sitting on the street car or looking to kill a few minutes. I was a only slightly concerned I was wasting my money picking up version two of the game, but despite the fact the graphics are pretty much exactly like the original, it offers up some great new twists.

I love anything that makes me think I'm smarter than the average bear. And time and time again, Brain Age reassures me that I am, in fact, a 20-year-old (i.e. the perfect "brain age"). However, Brain Age 2 makes me think I'm stupid! Okay, so I just started playing this past week, but the learning curve for this game is ramped up from version I. I'm really hoping it'll get easier so I'll continue to feel justified in my superiority.

The same basic options are offered when you load up Brain Age 2: Quick Play, Daily Training and Sudoku:

• You'll probably never use the Quick Play option; that's pretty much reserved for people who just want to try the game without saving their progress.
• Daily Training is the meat of the game; it's where you check your 'brain age' and where you train, or as Brain Age folk like to put it, "Flex your cortex!"
• And Sudoku is exactly as it sounds. It's sudoku. But if you're still playing the latest puzzle in your newspaper with an archaeic pen or pencil, you'll never go back after playing it on your DS.

The mini-games or training in version II are new twists on the original. For instance, instead of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing to your heart's content, the new twist on this game is Sign Finder. In this mini-game you're shown a math problem with an answer, but you have to figure out how they came to that answer -- did they add, subtract, multiply or divide?

If you spend any amount of time commuting, this is a great game to kill the time between ingesting bus fumes and transferring. The DS is a tight little package, and my Brain Age games are always close at hand.