CES '08: Brain Challenge Hands-On

Presuming that people who don't own Nintendo systems would also like to sharpen their mental acuity, traditionally mobile-based developer Gameloft has turned out a quick-and-dirty Brain Age-style mental teaser aptly titled Brain Challenge for the Xbox 360's Live Arcade. True to Gameloft's heritage, the 360 game is actually an expanded version of the phone-based original, and we tried out an early version of the game to see if it would make us any smarter in just a handful of minutes.

Anyone who's played Brain Age or its many imitators will be quite familiar with the setup here: You'll take instructions on numerous quick, cerebral minigames from a friendly, erudite guy or gal garbed in the requisite lab coat and specs. The minigames fall into five categories: logic, math, memory, visual, and focus. Each type of game throws specific tasks at you as fast as you can solve them. There seems to be a respectable number and variety of games in here. One of them has you determining the heaviest object based on some example scales (à la Big Brain Academy). Another gives you a grid of numbers and an operator (such as "minus 3") then makes you plot a course from number to number that satisfies the condition with each move.

Other games are based on your immediate awareness of the situation (or lack thereof). One gives you a number of bouncy balls, tasking you with quickly choosing the one that's bouncing highest. Another shows a distribution of different colored squares and asks you to eliminate the colored groups in order from least to most squares. A third plots a quick direction of arrows around a blank grid, erases the arrows, and then has you retrace the path as fast as you can. Like in Brain Age, the "daily test" option here throws a random assortment of these games at you, then saves and charts your progress over a period of time so you can see if you've improved.

There are a couple of other interesting ways to approach the minigames in Brain Challenge. One is a "stress test" that hurls minigames at you one after the other on one side of the screen while you have to keep up with a menial action--such as rotating the right thumbstick to keep a tiger running ahead of a car or tapping the appropriate shoulder button to help an ape balance on a ball--on the other part of the screen. Other variations on this theme include covering the screen with giant crawly bugs or adding a bunch of flames or visual interference to try to mess you up. Your "stress level" is presented on a thermometer at the end of these tests.

Lastly, there's a multiplayer mode for up to four people that we tried locally with two. This is a simple card game where each player has a deck in which each card is keyed to one of the five minigame categories. When it's your turn, you choose a card to play and then tackle an associated minigame. If you win it, that card is dismissed from your hand. The player with no cards and the highest score at the end wins. From the menus, it looks like you'll be able to play this multiplayer game over Xbox Live as well.

Gameloft is currently targeting an "early 2008" release for Brain Challenge.