Big Brain Academy - NDS (US)

June 6th, 2006, 23:26 Posted By: wraggster

News from Lik Sang

Earlier this year we covered the US release of the very popular Brain Age. Now the sequel is also out in English however, we can discover why when released in Japan, Big Brain Academy was the fastest selling DS title to date, and why both titles are still today in the Top 3 of the Japanese Charts. Where the first release focused on the age of your brain, this tosses your brain down on the scales and measures the weight. Coming from the mind of neuroscientist Professor Ryuta Kawashima, whose brain training books have sold over a million copies, each activity takes less than a minute to complete. As you can see from the middle screen below, there's five categories of challenges, and your performance is shown across thinking, analyzing, memorizing, computing, and identifying. For a bit of fun too, you can also compare your grey matter to the brains of famous people across history, and perhaps find out if you should be a world class doctor, or run for POTUS [Editor: for non-West-Wing-followers, that's President Of The United States].

Speed and accuracy are put to the test here through simple but deep mini games. On the first screen above for example there's animals on scales, and you must quickly touch which is the heaviest. There were just two scales to think about there, but you can imagine the workout you'll get when many more appear and multiple animals on each one! Here you can play a demo of it online, plus other mini games. A practice mode lets you get comfortable with the game's fast-paced assault of problems, while new to the sequel is a wireless battle mode, letting eight players compete with only one game cartridge to see who has the juiciest brain (pointless fact - Cannibals who eat the brain usually contract a rare disease called Kuru, but the rest of a body is all good, so to speak). In stock now and for only US$ 29.90, at last we can all get into shape while simply sitting on the couch wolfing down chips. Don't forget either that with the DS being completely region free, anyone the world over can import this.

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