Sunday 14 Jun 2009

As part of filling out the back catalog, Nintendo SA has been bringing out a number of games that were released in other countries before the launch of the DS in South Africa. Big Brain Academy is one of the titles that kick-started the DS phenomenon in Japan along with Nintendogs and Brain Training, so it’s worth looking at for that alone. It’s a very polished game, but like the Wii edition suffers from being a little short on content.

The academy is run by one Dr Lobe, a character shaped a little like a skittle with glasses. When you switch the game on he welcomes you and throws you straight into a test to measure your brain size. Of course, at this stage your brain is very small, probably less than 1 kilogram. This is why you’ve enrolled with the academy, right? The test consists of five sub-tests, one in each of the brain categories – Think, Analyse, Compute, Identify and Memorise. Each sub-test is a 60 second grilling that adapts its difficulty depending on how you did last time and how quick and accurate you are.

Once you’ve completed the 5 minute test and Dr Lobe has given you a grade, you can begin to train on whatever exercise you wish. There are 15 in total, 3 in each of the categories, and each one has an easy, medium and hard version. The goal in training is to get better at the exercise so that you perform better at the test and enhance your grade over time to an A. A secondary goal is to earn gold or platinum medals at each exercise, in each difficulty mode. This is not too difficult on Easy, but on Hard can be quite a challenge and requires you to be at your most alert. The scoring system is heavily oriented towards speed and accuracy – the more questions you get right in the 60 seconds the higher your score, and if you get a couple wrong your score drops significantly.

The puzzles

The Think puzzles get you to use logic to solve a set problem – for example, Heavyweight shows a set of scales with different objects or animals on them and you have to pick the heaviest object based on the way the scales are tipped. On Easy mode this will be very simple – there might be only a choice of a few objects and the way the scales are set up makes the answer easy to work out. On Hard mode there are far more objects and more scales on the screen with more objects on them, including combinations of objects, making figuring out the heaviest object much more difficult.

The Memorize puzzles test your memory in different ways. My favourite is Sound Bites, where various sounds are played in order and you must repeat the sounds in the same order by touching the object that made the sound. On Easy there will only be two or three sounds making remembering quite simple. On Hard there will be six or more sounds, and more objects on the screen. Fortunately the sounds make up a sort of rhythm as they play, making them easier to remember.

The Analyse puzzles involve your spatial skills – the ability to visualize things that are rotated or hidden behind other things. The Cube Game puzzle shows a bunch of cubes arranged to form a three dimensional shape, and asks you to count the total number of cubes in the picture, including ones that are hidden behind others. Obviously as the difficulty goes up so does the complexity of the three dimensional shape made of small cubes and thus the difficulty of counting them and visualizing what is hidden.

The Compute puzzles involve numerical computations. For example, Coin-Parison displays two sets of coins of varying denominations and you have to choose the set of coins that is more valuable. Simply counting the number of coins is not going to work because they are of differing amounts, but a laborious adding up of the values won’t work to get you gold either because if you do that you won’t be quick enough. Instead you have to make a quick judgment call on which set is bigger.

Identify involves more spatial challenges like finding matches or matching a shape to a picture. For example, the Get in Shape game shows a silhouette of a composite shape and you must select the pieces that were used to build this shape from a bunch of pieces shown on the touch screen. This starts off very straightforward, but becomes really tough on the harder levels as the pieces often look like they could fit into the shape but don’t.

Well made, but short on content

Each of these 15 games has a certain amount of variety within it, both in terms of difficulty and puzzle permutations. They do have an addictive quality as trying to get the gold and platinum medals on each puzzle can incentivise you to give it “just one more go” many times. Once you’ve reached that goal you probably won’t want to put yourself through the effort and concentration required to better your score though, and there fairly soon comes a point where you simply cannot improve your speed and accuracy any more and the game becomes played out. For me this took about 4 or 5 hours, and then I wished there were another 15 fresh games to try.

Big Brain Academy is a game that requires intense concentration for 60 second bouts of puzzle solving, so unlike non-time-based puzzle games it isn’t particularly suited to being played on the go. It also suffers from short longevity, something that the better puzzle games on DS (such as Picross, More Brain Training with its Sudoku, or Slitherlink) certainly don’t suffer from. For the time it takes to “complete” it there is much puzzle-fun to be had, but it doesn’t last long enough to make it a must-have.

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Contributor:	Peter

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