Nintendo DS focuses on gray matter with Big Brain Academy and Sudoku Gridmaster

Two new titles for Nintendo DS will extend Nintendo’s mental mastery and guarantee Nintendo DS owners will have plenty of ways to keep their brains busy this summer.

Big Brain Academy is the second game in the record-breaking brain-training series taking Japan by storm. In Big Brain Academy, players perform a series of fun and mentally stimulating mini-games. The game then assigns them a letter grade and cites a famous person or profession with a similar set of skills. This graphically appealing title measures skills like thinking, memorization, analysis, identification and computation. Big Brain Academy [$19.82], Rated E for Everyone, launches May 29.

A month later, sudoku fans will find themselves in number-crunching heaven as Sudoku Gridmaster makes its way to Nintendo DS on June 26. The system’s touch screen makes choosing or writing numbers easy. Players will find more than 400 puzzles, all of which were selected by the original creators of sudoku.

Sudoku is the most popular puzzle game in the world right now, and Sudoku Gridmaster puts hundreds of puzzles in portable form, just in time for the summer travel season. To satisfy novices and sudoku experts alike, the puzzles come in four difficulty settings: practice, easy, normal and hard. Sudoku Gridmaster is Rated E for Everyone.