E3 06: Big Brain Academy Preshow Hands-On

With Brain Age currently helping gamers across the world shape up their feeble minds, Nintendo is prepping yet another unique title for the Nintendo DS that's designed to feed your mind. Big Brain Academy is a collection of minigames that are designed to give the old grey matter a workout. We had the chance to try out a demo of the game at Nintendo's recent pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo event to find out how deficient our mind is.

Though similar in spirit to Brain Age, BBA takes a more abstract approach to its mental workout. The demo on display featured minigames broken up into five different categories: think, memorize, analyze, compute, and identify. Each exercise is designed to test your brain's prowess in different ways. Think games require you to do activities such as guessing which of an assortment of objects weighs more or figuring out how to reunite different creatures by drawing a line. Memorize games require you to perform activities such as listen to noises and replay them in the correct order. Analyze games focus on examinations such as matching a pair of pictures out of a set or counting cubes. Compute games appear to be more math-based and require you to select panels with sums of money on them or solve arithmetic problems. Finally, identify games require you to match objects under a variety of conditions. As you go through the various mental examinations, your performance will be reflected on a graph that maps your ratings in each of the different categories.

While the game may be similar to Brain Age in terms of its intent, its methods are a bit different. Whereas Brain Age is all text and math problems, Big Brain Academy appears to be taking a much more abstract and visual approach, which, from what we've seen, is a little more accessible. Rather than frighten people off with math problems and loads of text, BBA relies on visually driven challenges that aren't as intimidating, thanks to a squiggly style of line art that's unassuming.

Based on what we played, it was hard to get too deep with Big Brain Academy, but it obviously has potential. The games are all quick and relatively painless, thanks to the art style and low-key approach. The exercises we tried were fun and easy to play, which is another notch in the game's favor. If you're a fan of Brain Age, or looking to do some mental self-improvement, you'll want to keep an eye out for Big Brain Academy when it ships next month.