When I first tried Left Brain Right Brain 2 out, I remembered to stay open-minded—to judge the game based on what it claims to be, rather than what I wanted it to be. On the back of the case, it advertises, "Hone your mental skills to become truly ambidextrous!" And since I wouldn't mind being ambidextrous, I thought I could put aside issues of fine detail like sound design to judge exactly how ambidextrous it would help me become.

It turns out this game's value in helping someone become "truly" ambidextrous is approximately zero. It is designed as a collection of twenty minigames. You can choose to play any you like at any time; there are five levels of game difficulty, with four games in each level. You tell the game which is your dominant hand when you first turn it on. The game uses this to tell you how to play. All of the games are played in the book format with the DS on its side, the touchscreen on the side of whichever hand you are training. You play a minigame with your dominant hand, flip the DS around, and play the same game again with your other hand. The game logs your time or score according to each hand, and if your dominant hand wins out, it tells you to practice some more. There is a calendar mode in which you can look at what games you played on what day and how high you scored with each hand.

The idea is obviously that you practice every day until your non-dominant hand can match or beat your strong hand. The problem is that all of the minigames fall into four categories: tap the screen furiously, tap the screen strategically, scratch the screen furiously, or scratch the screen strategically. You can practice every minigame every day and there's no doubt you still won't be able to write well with your non-dominant hand. All Left Brain Right Brain 2 trains is your ability to tap or scratch a screen better.

Since the game can't live up to its own advertising, perhaps there is some fun to be found in the minigames themselves? No, sorry. They are all simplistic and easy. Exercises on the fifth difficulty level gave my left hand no more trouble than exercises on the second. Their imagination and programming ranks in the annals of the easiest-to-program Flash games found on the Internet. In fact, I'm sure I could learn how to program each of them in Flash in an afternoon or two. And then, I would have a valuable skill besides the ability to tap a stylus very quickly with my left hand.

 As for the other details, there is not much to be said about them. The graphics are bad but they are not the point. There is wireless multiplayer, in which you can challenge a friend to see who can tap a stylus the fastest with their non-dominant hands, but this is not particularly impressive. The sound is notably awful. There are only two songs that I noticed playing during the minigames, and they switch as often as you switch hands around, but both are annoying. When you run low on time, the music kicks into a "hurry up" song, which is also annoying, never plays to its completion, and always interrupts the previous music before it is finished as well. The sound effects are passable except on one stage, in which the goal is to tap crows to keep them from popping balloons. Every time you touch a crow, it makes a sound like a little boy's soul crying out from hell as it drops off the screen.

Overall: 2/10