Big Brain Academy

"The Big Brain am winning again! I am the greetest!"

Okay, Futurama references aside, Big Brain Academy is a fun little game to get your mind moving. It was designed in order to get people to think, identify, memorize, analyze, and compute much faster than before. Anyone who picks up this game and spends some time with it will realize just how much this game will help.

The best way to start is to just go ahead and take the Test from the start. There are five categories of brain training, each with three different exercises. Test will randomly pick one game from each of those categories and judge how fast you can complete the puzzles in one minute. After that it gives you a grade, and compares you to a profession. At first I was a C-, but I'm now up to a B, and I have to keep trying if I want to get better. Still, a B is a Lawyer, so I'm not that bad.

The Think category is designed to make you follow simple directions quickly. One game has you trying to figure out where to drop a bone for a dog, with the path the dog will be going on the top screen. Another requires you to draw a path for an animal for it to reach its mate. The other one has animals on weights, and you must figure out which is the heaviest by each animal's comparison to another. Think was easiest for me, so I didn't have to spend much time with it at all.

Memorize focuses on improving your short term memory. The first game makes you listen to sounds and then play them back (I have a story to tell on this later). The second makes you remember numbers and type them back, while the last shows you pictures and has you select which were in the group.

Analyze is the most quirky one, in my opinion. It usually takes a while longer to get these games than most of the others. One game has you counting blocks. While it may seem easy at first, you also have to take into account hidden blocks as well. Eventually you start to take blocks in groups in order to count them quicker. Another has you drawing lines to connect dots. You're only supposed to connect the lines that are shown on the top screen, and sometimes the picture is rotated, throwing you off. The last one shows you lines of animals, and a grid on the bottom. You have to find the pattern and trace it quickly.

Compute just happens to be the one I had the most difficulty with, since, surprisingly, I'm bad at counting coins quickly. Two groups of coins are shown on the bottom screen, and you have to select which one is worth more money. This one is actually a little weird, since I got a gold on the medium difficulty before the easy. I assume easy requires you to have lightning-fast reaction time in order to complete enough levels. They also have a simple mathematics game where you compute small equations (Two plus two = ?), which I happen to be great at. The last one is hard to explain in words, but it's a combination of counting and adding.

Last there's identify. You can either pick out a picture from a group of silhouettes, build a structure from a group of blocks that you're given, and find the matches out of many pairs.

If you have trained your brain plenty and want to prove how smart you are, BBA has an excellent multiplayer mode that includes every game from every category. It's fun and a great way to test your skills, but make sure you don't set the difficulty too high. When playing the sound game with my friend, we actually got stuck in an infinite loop, as you can't quit the game midway through. It was embarrassing for us, since it proved we were really stupid, but after we finally finished it, I was better at the game than ever before.

I haven't played Brain Age, so I can't compare these two games, but BBA is an excellent way to spend $20, and it certainly won't hurt to give your brain a little exercise. Just prepare to feel a bit stupid when you start playing it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/27/06