Review: Big Brain Academy
Big Brain Academy is the American game made hurriedly to ride the “Train Your Brain†wave started by Brain Age. You would think that its second-in-line status would make is a cheap rip-off, but it’s actually a pretty good game in its own right.
Instead of measuring the age of your brain in years, where twenty years old is the ideal, like Brain Age does, Big Brain Academy weighs your brain. An ideal brain “weighs†1400 grams, but I haven’t been able to get my brain over 800 grams and it keeps telling me that I have the brain of a museum curator. It measures your brain based on several different activities called Think (?!), Memorize, Analyze, Compute, and Identify.
The heartening thing about this game is that it seems more in tune with training your brain than the activities in Brain Age. I was talking to a woman whose husband is dealing with aphasia, which is a mental impairment that causes you to lose your words. His doctor tested him by taking out groups of coins and asking which group was more money. That exact test is one that is in the Compute section of the game.
There are a total of 15 tests that you can play with as much as you want every day. Dr. Lobe doesn’t tell me that you’ve already played a game for today, he just lets me keep trying to get a gold medal on Bone Yard over and over until I lose interest. He also doesn’t notice if I didn’t play yesterday and he doesn’t compliment me when I play every day.
It’s obvious that Dr. Lobe doesn’t inspire the kind of love and affection that Doctor Kawashima of Brain Age does. There are no Flickr groups dedicated to him and no one is collecting a fund to buy him sinus medication. He’s just a blob, really. Sure, he gives me medals when I do well, but I don’t really love him like I do Doctor Kawashima.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like playing Big Brain Academy. What it lacks in personality, it makes up for in interesting games. With over 15 training games to choose from and three levels of difficulty for each, I’m extremely happy with this game. I play it every day, even though Dr. Lobe doesn’t give me positive reinforcement for daily play.
Update 08-27-06: Gear Live does a weekly video showing how to play Big Brain Academy in single card multi-player mode.
This video is too long, but it gives you a good idea of what the game is like and a shocking example of the Nintendo DS vs. the DS Lite.