I've written before about my love for Nintendo. It's not just because they threw us a fantastic Wii party this summer (although I admit I was barely aware of them before that). The truth is, I don't play the Wii as much as my husband and daughter do. When I'm home during the day, I am either writing, doing housework, or writing about how much I hate doing housework.
And when I'm home at night, I like to veg in front of the TV. I'll be doing a lot of that over the next few weeks, as the networks roll out their new shows and new episodes of my favorite returning series. (And I have a lot of those.)
But even though I just described my favorite evening pasttime as "vegging," I'm not completely idle. I find that I can't just sit there and watch. I have to do something while I'm sitting there.
For most of my life, that something usually involved food. There's nothing more relaxing than munching while you watch TV. Unfortunately, that is the kind of behavior that contributed to my enormous weight gain over the last year, and it's a habit I've had to break. I'm proud to say that I have -- and I owe it all to a little device called the Nintendo DS.
The DS is Nintendo's latest generation of handheld gaming devices, a replacement for the Gameboy. It's innovations include its dual color screen (hence, the DS acronym), microphone and playback capacity, and optical character recognition. So in addition to the buttons and cross-like control keys you see on older gaming devices, DS games may also employ a stylus, allowing you to control games by tapping the screen and/or writing numbers and words directly upon it.
In other words, this is a gaming device that a middle aged woman can embrace -- a woman like me. And so these days, while I'm watching TV, I'll have my girly pink DS in hand, solving a Sudoku or crossword puzzle... or testing my brain's age... or watching colorful little plankton float across a screen. It keeps my hands busy. And if my hands are busy, I can't walk to the refrigerator and grab something to eat. This has cured me of my night feeding urges.
Nintendo has successfully embraced the aging Baby Boomer market with its best-selling "Brain Age" game. The original game put you through a series of mind-teasing puzzles and tasks and computes your "brain age" by assessing how quickly you complete them. The ideal is to achieve a score of 20. I got completely annoyed by it, because the lowest score I could attain was 58, which is seven years older than I actually am.
They've now followed it up with even more mind-twisting fun in Brain Age 2, which offers animated anagrams that you have to decipher quickly, a version of rock-paper-scissors and a piano recital function that's kind of cool. It still makes me crazy, though -- so far, I can't bring my brain age younger than 76. Rather than enjoy the challenge, I just get angry at it, so I haven't explored it as much as I'd like. (Maybe I should drink a double espresso and give it a try. That should speed up my reaction time a bit!)
However, both Brain Age games come with 100 Sudoku puzzles, which I do enjoy -- especially while watching TV. I don't solve them as quickly as the game designers think I should, but I feel just doing the puzzles helps keep my mind sharp -- and my hands out of the cookie jar. So I am getting some mental acuity out of them.
I keep my DS in my handbag and whip it out whenever I'm sitting around bored (which is often, if you think about all the times I'm waiting for my child outside the school... or inside the gym while she is finishing her workout... or if I'm at the doctor's office, the dentist's office... well, you get the idea).
Another cool feature of the DS is that it has wi-fi built in, so if there is another DS in the vicinity, you can play games together (some games will allow up to eight players to hook in). This has made the device popular with my daughter and her friends, who bring theirs to playdates and sleepovers and share their games. Her current favorite is DK Jungle Climber, which hit the stores last week.
For the uninitiated, DK is that venerable video game character Donkey Kong, and this action game boasts "simple controls," which I assume means that even an old biddy like myself can successfully make Donkey and his sidekick Diddy Kong climb the jungle vines with ease.
"I can't believe you're going to play that," my daughter said when I informed her of my intention to try it out before writing about it here. But she was right -- whenever I try to play one of her games, I get frustrated and lost. Suffice it to say that she's been playing with this one nearly non-stop since the kind folks at Nintendo sent it to us a couple of weeks ago. "This one is really fun!" she exclaimed, once she got the hang of it. Her friends like it, too -- however, they've decided that this one is not as good as a multi-player game as when it's played solo. I will take their word for it.
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