Mine is 1,173 grams. How big is yours? What? 739 grams? Ha! You are so tiny! No wonder the women in your office titter behind their hands when you walk by!
Apparently size matters when it comes to all kinds of body parts, including your brain. (Women are into smart guys, see. What did you think we were talking about?) Hence, Big Brain Academy, Nintendo's followup to the Nintendo DS neuron-stimulator Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes A Day.
Big Brain Academy doesn't really compute the mass of your grey matter, obviously, since that would require scooping out your brain and putting it on a scale, a procedure generally associated with autopsies. And killing your customers isn't very good business, unless you're in the tobacco industry.
But it does test your mental muscles with five groups of tasks: Analyze, memorize, identify, compute and think. Unlike Brain Age, you can access all of Big Brain Academy's exercises from the get-go, so there's no day-to-day training period to unlock content.
Unfortunately, that just illustrates how thin the content is. There are only 15 exercises in total, each with three difficulty levels. You can play them solo to earn medal rankings, challenge your friends in a wireless multiplayer match or tackle a complete test that gives you an overall score expressed as a brain weight in grams.
Big Brain Academy is great for learning where your own mental strengths lie. I'm a whiz at identifying matching shapes in a crowd and I absolutely dominate the tests that require memorizing sequences of numbers or sounds.
But I fail miserably on anything involving calculation, like counting the blocks in a 3-D stack or tallying the value of a set of coins. I was told there would be no math in journalism!
The biggest weakness of this pseudo-game is that, unlike Brain Age, there's no real sense of advancing and getting smarter as a result of the tests. If anything, Big Brain Academy made me feel slightly stupid, since I couldn't come close to matching the "average" brain weight of 1,400 grams.
And if I wanted to feel stupid, I'd just walk past the women in the office. Why are they always laughing?
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BOTTOM LINE
This followup to Brain Age has a challenging and fun collection of exercises, but not much long-term value. And it might ultimately make you feel like a bit of a dolt.
WHAM! Rating: |
6 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
E (Everyone) |
Official Web Site: |
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