Brain Age is a video game that your mother could pick up and play without any help from you. That is Nintendo's plan: to win the affections and the dollars of all those people who do not currently play video games, on account of those large controllers are confusing and the guys behind the counter at the game shop smell bad.

It's a good plan, at least from a business perspective. There are many more non-gamers than gamers. Great numbers of people, who are happy to fiddle with solitaire or minesweeper on their computers, find the landscape of first-person shooters and sports simulations unappealing at best, and frequently outright hostile. There is a market to be tapped. Somebody might as well tap it. But is Brain Age any fun?

The honest answer is a bit of a cop-out: sort of. It is a bit like taking a test over and over, albeit a test that is itself reasonably good fun. How are you at quick math problems? At pattern recognition? At counting? At memorization? If you are good at some or all of these, the game will congratulate you and tell you that you have the brain of a young person, and you will feel smug and proud of yourself. On the other hand, if you have a tough time telling the difference between words and colours, you will feel very old and feeble-headed.

The point of Brain Age is noble: it claims to provide just the sort of mental exercise that will keep you sharp into your autumn years, presumably helping you with your quality of life and warding off dementia and generally making you more clever than you are now. It does this by putting you through a series of tests, and then by putting you through a series of daily training exercises, which are designed to work the right bits of your mind. The idea is that if you do the exercises every day, your brain will adapt to the challenge, and your performance in the daily tests will improve until you have the mental fitness of a 20-year-old.

A quick aside here. There is a reason, grounded in years of actuarial data, to doubt that 20-year-olds, as a group, make up the sharpest and mentally fittest segment of the population. Why do you have to pay vastly more for car insurance if you are 20 than if you are 35? Because 20-year-olds are dumbasses with poor judgment who drive into trees and other cars far more frequently than drivers of other ages.

Still, the central conceit of the brain age concept, which is that you start out in OK shape, and then you either use it or you lose it, is appealing and, at least on its face, reasonable. Who doesn't want a sharper memory? Who doesn't want quicker reflexes? Who doesn't want to be quicker at arithmetic, if only to have an easier time splitting the bill at all those middle-age brunches?

The tests are hard. In one, short words appear, and you must shout out the colour of the letters. For example, the word "Yellow" will appear, rendered in red type. It is much harder than you think to look at the shade and say "red," rather than simply reading out loud. The humiliation of doing badly fades with practice, and the task itself gets easier. Whether this is good for the mind at large remains an open question, but it feels like progress, and that much, after a few days at it, makes Brain Age feel like a worthwhile way to spend time.

The game comes with a giant collection of sudoku puzzles. If you have never tried these before, don't start now. They are in every newspaper and they will eat your life. What's the point of being all smart if you forget to wash?