Roughly a month ago Nintendo finally treated the world outside of Japan to the craze that was and still is sweeping their nation, touch based brain training exercises. That original title localized as Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! along with the companion pieces have gone on to sell millions of copies, and still show no real sign of lagging sales. A month later now, and Nintendo has brought to our shores the second of these brain exercising titles re-titled as Big Brain Academy to our shores. While the predecessor used simple equations, counting, memorization, and more, this title takes a radically different approach. Does this title stack up as well as the last one? Read on to find out.

Facts and Features:

• Big Brain Academy is a series of minigames (called Activities) that are designed to exercise the brain.
  
  
• Players can “weigh” their brain in Test mode, earn medals for individual activities in Practice mode or play against friends and family in Versus mode.
  
  
• Big Brain Academy's Test mode will quiz players in five areas: thinking, memorization, computation, analysis and identification!
  
  
• This title features a riotous multiplayer mode in which up to eight people can play with a single game card!
  

Presentation
Big Brain Academy and its companion title are both simplistic educational type mini game packages, but BBA attempts a different direction to go that extra mile. On the surface where Brain Age kept it simple with very few colors, light passing audio, and mostly a black and white display aside from the animated Professor Kawashima, this title does not. BBA adds a more comical and lighter touch to both its audio and visual package. Where this comes into place is the necessity to spice up the various mini games presented within the package given to the user. Unlike in BA, BBA relies greatly on visualization and audio to pull off the various brain training exercises. Unlike the title inspired by Professor Kawashima, this is a creation of Nintendo’s own and as such they had to invent quite the interesting mascot for the game. The mascot is literally just a squiggle guy on a scale, and he is known as Dr. Lobe, the headmaster of the Big Brain Academy. Like our host the menus of the game are a combination of squiggle art and low color smooth panels to navigate about. Within the mini-games the same minimalist approach continues with simple artistic drawings, shapes, and menus that are easy on the eyes for people of all ages so there is little confusion.

The audio side of the game is in most cases a companion and not integral to the title, but in a few places being hard of hearing or deaf could be detrimental. You see while much of the game basically consists of visuals to match up items, draw lines, and so on there are a select few areas that require the use of audio to play. One such game plays much like the classic Milton Bradley light and sound game ‘Simon,’ except that it is done with pictures of animals, things, and instruments which you have to memorize the order of the sounds they make, and tap it back correctly in that order. Each of these sounds are great crisp samplings of whatever figure is drawn to the screen. Audio throughout the entire package has a nice sharp yet simple clarity to it whether it is a sound effect for a mini-game, or perhaps the nice soft, more youth oriented sounding musical scoring. Over the full audio package the music is nothing more than a base background MIDI like type sampling, while the rest of the sound effects are sharp and clear getting the job done.

Gameplay
As anyone could guess from such a simple package of both audio and visuals for the presentation of the game, that if it were to sell then gameplay would have to be the selling point of Big Brain Academy, and I assure you it is. Primarily speaking, this is a single player outing, but it does include a mode for up to 8 players over a single copy of the game to compete for the heaviest brain. BBA is based off of five styles of cognitive function in which each is challenged through three choices of mini-game within each category. On the surface it wouldn’t seem like much given there are just fifteen mini-games to work with, but the quality of the challenges make it worth the time and effort.