Big Brain Academy Hands-On

The recent release of Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day is further proof that quirkiness has a home on the Nintendo DS. While the first game--chock-full of puzzles, memorization games, and math problems--focused on the age of your brain, the sequel, Big Brain Academy, is more focused on the weight of your brain. We got a chance to check out this second helping of handheld brain-building edutainment and are here to report that our brains definitely need to start packing on the pounds.

The first time you play BBA, you need to create a profile that will save your test results and daily practice routines, just like in the previous game. Unlike the first game, however, the blocky visage of Professor Ryuta Kawashima (the neuroscientist whose work the game's puzzles are based on) is nowhere to be found, and instead he is replaced by a cute, cartoony blob of brain matter named Dr. Lobe, who just happens to have a fondness for L33T-speak.

Your first order of business is setting a baseline for yourself to work from and, to do so, you'll take a quick test that touches on the five major aspects of brain-building covered in the game: think, analyze, memorize, compute, and identify. Each aspect has specific tests associated with it, all of which require you to flex different portions of your mental muscle. The first test, compute, had us staring at the top screen of the DS, which contained a number of different cartoon images, like trains, dinosaurs, and plants. On the lower screen of the DS, several boxes containing various quantities of other items were displayed, the idea being that you had to touch the boxes that added up to the number of items found on the upper screen. So, if there were five items up top, you had to find one box containing three items, and another containing two; or, one box containing four items, and another with just one item, and so on.

The next test, analyze, featured two images placed side by side on the top screen, and a number of images placed in a row on the bottom screen. The challenge was to draw a line between two of the elements on the bottom row, which matched the two on the top. Sometimes the lower-screen examples were side by side, and sometimes they were diagonal from one another. The third challenge, memorize, was much more straightforward: You simply stared at a series of images for a few seconds, and then identified which items were missing when the screen reset itself.

The last two tests, identify and compute, were a bit more difficult, if only because they were slightly more abstract. Identify featured a number of shadows moving on the upper screen, and the goal was to tap the cartoon figures on the lower screen simply by identifying their shadows. It was simple at first, but, as the round went on, the shadows began to move quickly and began to look more like each other. The compute test challenged us to pick the heavier of two or more items shown, based on a visual representation of how they weighed on a measuring scale. Again, it was easy at first, as there were only two items. But once you got into three or more items, things got more complex--item B may outweigh item A, but item C outweighs item B... We get confused just thinking about it.

Once we finished the initial tests, Dr. Lobe chimed in with our initial brain weight. Ours was a paltry 810 grams (by comparison, Dr. Lobe said his weighed in at more than 1,900 grams, but considering he is made almost completely out of brains, we think that's cheating). Dr. Lobe went on to tell us our personal strengths (memorization) and weaknesses (computing). Dr. Lobe concluded that, based on the test results, we had the brain of "a doctor" (hey, that's not so bad) and gave us a C-minus for our efforts (what?!), a grade we hope to improve in the coming weeks.

After the test was done we moved onto many of the different practice modes in order to add some much-needed weight to our brains. Most of the tests in BBA seem to follow the more abstract, visual take on brain puzzles, though there are some straight-up math problems as well. Some of the other tests in the game have you drawing with the stylus, either to help cartoon animals find a path from the upper screen to the lower screen, or to fill in the missing lines in a connect-the-dots puzzle. One nice feature is the ability to access a bunch of games and various difficulty levels right away. In Brain Age, by contrast, you only had a few games available to you at any time and had to wait several days to unlock new challenges. Big Brain Academy also includes a versus mode, which will let you challenge your friends in various tests to see who has the chubbiest gray matter of all.

In all, the tests in Big Brain Academy are brighter, more colorful, and a bit more bizarre than those found in the original Brain Age, and we already like the humorous new take on the brainteasing genre a great deal. Best of all, the game is due for release early next month, so with any luck, all our brains will be a bit fatter in the near future. Stay tuned for more on BBA in the coming weeks.