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Big Brain Academy

Posted October 10th 2006 by Jordan Mammo.

In just a few short years, the casual gamer has entered the crosshairs of nearly every large publisher in the videogame industry. Of the three big hardware manufacturers, Nintendo has been the most vocal about appealing to people outside of gaming's core audience, but Sony has tasted some success with their Eye Toy, and even Microsoft has positioned their Xbox Live Arcade as a place where anyone can sit back and enjoy some good old-fashioned electronic entertainment. It's taken a while, but publishers are starting to wake up and realize that casual gaming is serious business, and everyone from Time Magazine's Lev Grossman to N-Philes' own Ben Wood is writing about their attempts to tap into the market.

Alongside Nintendo's gateway game line-up of rambunctious puppy dogs and musically-inclined plankton lies neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, a man who gained notoriety in Japan for his theories claiming that the brain, like all muscles in the human body, needs regular exercise to stay young and stave off deterioration. After writing a brain-exercise book based on his findings, Kawashima collaborated with Nintendo in translating his ideas into what would become one of the Nintendo DS's biggest, and probably most surprising, hits. The partnership has so far yielded two products: Brain Age and its successor Big Brain Academy, both of which use surprisingly different approaches aimed at the same audience.

When Brain Age was released it looked nothing like what we'd usually expect to come out of Nintendo. The title's presentation was very basic and remarkably sterile, seemingly devoid of personality outside of a floating polygonal representation of Dr. Kawashima's face. And frankly, disembodied floating heads are kind of creepy. Creepiness aside, the ultra clean look may not have drawn a lot of people in, but it also didn't risk putting anybody off.

Brain Age consisted of a series of mini-games that revolved around writing, reading aloud, solving simple math problems, memorization, and simple counting exercises. Your scores were then used to calculate your "brain age," and the younger it was the better shape your noggin' was in. Rather than simply spotlighting high scores, Brain Age focused more on short-term bursts of play with long-term results. The game would even track your progress through a series of graphs spanning months, and even went so far as to explain which parts of your brain were being stimulated by the different exercises. Though I'm not sure how great the term "non-game" is, Brain Age is certainly more deserving of the phrase than most of the various Touch Generations brand titles.

Considering the success of Brain Age, it was not surprising when Nintendo fielded a new title in the series, Big Brain Academy. The sequel follows up the original with fifteen mini-games spread across five different categories: Compute, Memorize, Identify, Analyze, and Think, with games ranging from identifying the group of coins with the highest value to discerning which object weighs more than all of the others. The title offers a Practice mode in which players can earn medals and a Test mode where you can take part in one randomly-selected mini-game from each category. Like Brain Age, you're graded on speed and accuracy and then are shown your results (in this case being the weight of your brain accompanied by a grade).

That, however, is where many of the similarities end, since Big Brain Academy begins to diverge in its presentation and structure. Gone is Dr. Kawashima's lovingly-rendered visage and thrown away is Brain Age's almost-too-clean look. In its place we find the academy being run by Dr. Lobe, a professor rendered in a colorful 2nd-grader sketch style that's much more similar to what we're used to seeing from Nintendo.

Along with this shift in presentation comes a change regarding the game‘s content. The challenges are now shorter and, thanks to an input scheme that requires less of the player (simply touch the correct answer instead of, say, writing out words or numbers), the game is much faster-paced. The multiplayer mode has also been fleshed out and expanded to include every mini-game on the cartridge, and while the game still records your high score, it ditches the progress tracking of its predecessor.

Considering these changes, Big Brain Academy seems to be much more comfortable with being a videogame than Brain Age is, and when it comes to attracting that older non-gamer, it may not be trying very hard to do so. If that's the case, though, why push it as a Touch Generations title? Nintendo's still supposedly aiming for that crowd of casuals with the title, but even if the title retains the same focus, I can't imagine the Crayola-like presentation and fast-paced, high-score-oriented focus appealing to as many people as it's supposed to - unless it's meant to be picked up after playing Brain Age, presumably because the person would then be more comfortable with gaming than he or she was before.

Still, that assumes that Nintendo and the DS have gone mainstream in the United States and the rest of the world in the same way they have in Japan. And that's something that hasn't really happened (heck, a significant portion of the people who've bought these Touch Generations games are probably gamers themselves), so I think Big Brain Academy's effect on its proposed audience may be weaker than expected because, well, it may not quite have one yet.

Personally, I don't play Big Brain Academy that often - maybe once a day, if that. When I originally picked it up, I tried the first test where I earned a B+ score and felt like I was wasting my time solving annoying elementary-school-level problems. Somehow though it all went downhill from there; my brain weight got lower and lower and I felt completely stupid for wasting my time blanking on annoying elementary-school-level problems. Dr. Lobe told me I had the brain of a fashion stylist as my score dropped to a C-. This prompted me to wonder if it were possible to get dumber the more I trained my brain. It's a soul-crushing game and I don't like its attitude. I do keep coming back to it, though, working bit by bit to try and redeem myself.

And that's probably why I enjoy it. The fast pace and expanded multiplayer appeal to my more gamer-like sensibilities, and since the game isn't just focused on reading and math, the challenges themselves are more interesting than Brain Age's were. While the lack of progress tracking may be missed and the generally more in-your-face presentation is more annoying than I'd like, Big Brain Academy makes up for it by being more fun. In the end, that's what's going to let it find its audience more than anything else.

Steady Beat - Brainy.

Despite the changes the title has undergone, Big Brain Academy still manages to make you think differently than other games do, and, like Brain Age, that's where it succeeds the most. It's a simple game that challenges you with seemingly all-too-easy puzzles that hold a surprising amount of depth and replayability to them, and you don't have to invest too much to make it feel worth your time. It may not be the best choice for your dad, but at twenty bucks you can't really go wrong if you're looking for something different and challenging.

Posted in: Reviews