First Impressions: The next time someone asks how much you can bench, tell them 52 pounds.
The Nintendo DS’ recent touch-based puzzle hits, Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, have been driving gamers wild. It seems that players love training their brain through the assortment of mini-games and weighing the results. Big Brain Academy in particular places a special emphasis on brain weight. The game measures the player’s brain’s weight in correlation to their test scores. The game argues the higher the score, the heftier the brain, and thus the smarter the actual player. Due to these games’ popularity, Nintendo has decided to release a re-imagined version of Big Brain Academy on the Wii. This new title is not a sequel but rather a remake of the DS original.
Wii’s Big Brain Academy plays similarly to the original DS title. The player tests his or her specific mental faculties (memory, identification, etc.) through an assortment of random mini-games. In one the player smacks numbered blocks to equal a given digit. In another, the player zaps bricks to reconstruct an adjacent image
Just like the DS games, Big Brain Academy possesses simplistic yet charming and colorful 2D graphics. As a bonus, this version of Big Brain Academy will be able to channel spoken messages of encouragement from the Wii remote’s speaker to keep players in line. The game also has a two-player mode that features competitive brain training sessions.
