Big Brain Academy

"Graduating with C's"

If you need any reassurance of Nintendo's "non-gamer" philosophy, look no further than the company's line of Brain Training software. The series has had a stranglehold on Japan's weekly game charts for several months. Brain Age in the states has even started appearing in clinics and late-night infomercials. In fact, Brain Age is the only game that has made my father ever say, "Let me try that again." With that kind of reputation, it's no surprise a pseudo-sequel to Brain Age was on the way.

Graphics:
Big Brain Academy isn't a true sequel, though, evident by its drastic change in personality and presentation. Where Brain Age was very rigid and professional, Big Brain Academy is kooky and cartoony. Brain Age's talking severed head is replaced by a shakily drawn, blob-like professor, and the activities therein all involve brightly colored pictures of animals, flowers, and robots. In a sense, I suppose this wackier appearance will deter those "non-gamers" who found interest in Brain Age. On the other hand, consistent gamers like myself find Big Brain Academy to be easier to dive into for being over-the-top.

Gameplay:
And trust me, this game is crazy-- a good kind of crazy. It's like WarioWare but designed to improve your "brain weight" (or so the game says). Inside, there are different categories of activities (aka mini-games) to choose from to help keep your brain well-rounded. This includes sections like Think, Analyze, and Memorize, among others. So you may be required to count how many blocks there are in a stack, memorize a series of sounds, or even figure out which object weighs the most depending on how it relates to all the other scales on screen. You are only given about a minute to see how many steps you can get through in each game. Afterwards, a pentagon graph shows which categories you excel in and which need some improvement.

If you decide to take "the test," you'll play a random game from each category and receive a grade at the end. Obviously, the goal is to eventually work up to an A. Unlike Brain Age, however, you don't have to wait until the next day to give it another go. If you want to earn that A right now, you can. It'll just take a little work to get there. Big Brain Academy is not easy! These games can get really challenging and frantic.

Lasting Appeal:
Unfortunately, if you do get an A, your only reward is satisfaction. Big Brain Academy has nothing to unlock. This seems kind of odd for a game that feels more like a game than Brain Age did. I mean, Brain Age gave you new activities every few days. In Big Brain Academy, all the activities are already open from the start. Worse yet, these 15 games don't go very far. Whereas they are very WarioWare-like in nature, it's a little disappointing there aren't more of them. And without any kind of daily progression chart, Big Brain Academy feels like a step backwards from its predecessor.

Thanks to a great implementation of the single-card download play, however, Big Brain Academy is one of the best party games for the DS. Where the single-player was a race against the clock, the multiplayer is a race against each other. Up to eight players can play through all 15 games together in an attempt to reach a brain weight of 300 grams. In each game, the first player to get the question right wins 10 grams, the next slightly less, and so on until the last player barely gets anything (or even negative grams if they fail to answer correctly). This mode is absolutely hilarious and very competitive. If you play a lot of local wireless games, you or one of your friends need to have this in the mix.

Overall:
I'm hesitant to say Big Brain Academy is necessarily better than Brain Age. In Brain Age, there was actually a lot of incentive to keep playing every day-- in the form of graphs, new games, a working Sudoku mode, etc. Big Brain doesn't do any of that, which really hurts the experience. Even though Big Brain is more lively, wacky, and faster-paced, playing this by yourself wears thin rather quickly. But the included multiplayer mode is fantastic. It's seriously worth buying just for that.

Points:
+ More lively than Brain Age
+ Fast-thinking mini-games are always fun
+ Great multiplayer
-- No daily progression
-- No unlockable content
-- 15 activities isn't a very large selection

Score: 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/29/06