Big Brain Academy

Jun 5, 2006

Prepare to enter the halls of Big Brain Academy, a not-quite-a-game game that operates on the same basic premise as Nintendo's Brain Age -- a fun way to test your smarts and potentially improve your mind. After taking numerous classes and listening to some rambling mini-lectures from Professor Lobe (who founded Big Brain Academy after staring at the sun and yelling at it for being brighter than him), I'm ready to report on my educational experience. What have I learned? Big Brain Academy is a fun collection of activities with a strong multiplayer component, but unfortunately none of it really stuck with me after I'd left the classroom.

While Brain Age was pitched as a training tool to keep your brain young, Big Brain Academy operates on the premise that you want the fattest, heaviest brain on the block. Success here is measured in grams. While the idea of your brain shrinking and contracting inside your head is humorous and odd, it's tough to take your brain weight as anything other than a high score. The fact that it takes a near mastery of every category to break 1400 grams -- the average weight of a human brain according to Professor Lobe -- makes the scoring feel pretty silly. The good news is the fifteen games/tests/activities can be quite fun.

As mentioned in my preview, your brain will be rated (or weighed) in five categories: Think, Identify, Compute, Analyze, and Memorize. Each category has three activities to measure your aptitude, with each activity taking about one minute to complete. Logic-themed thinking has you predicting dog movement on a grid, completing a path that will get animal A to point B, and gauging which objects are heavier than the others. Memorize has you memorize number strings and play variations of "Simon," Analyze has you counting cubes and recognizing patterns, Identify shows you shadow shapes and has you match pairs, and Compute is human-calculator-themed fun. You can play the games at several levels of difficulty in practice, or go for the top weight, playing one game from each category in Test mode.

The visual theme is fun, with a lot of abstract shapes and kitties, and some of the games are fairly involved. Unfortunately, this is where the inconsistencies come in. The Think and Analyze categories tend to have the most involved complex activities that are less than intuitive the first time around. Even when you have the hang of them, unlike the simpler, fast-paced games, it's possible to sink a lot of time into a problem and still get it wrong, which can destroy your rating in that category. In other games, luck seems to play a bigger part that it should. As a result, your strengths and weaknesses that determine your "brain type" can change wildly from one session to the next.

I once went from being told I had the brain profile of Sherlock Holmes to getting pegged as a fashion stylist in the space of ten minutes. Before the day was over I'd also been compared to a master architect, museum curator, investment banker, and musician. A few days later, I was perfectly rounded Leonardo da Vinci -- but with a brain weight that was nowhere near my top score (and unfortunately only the top score is recorded). Maybe the game is just telling me that I can be whatever I want to be, but I never really felt like the game was gauging my abilities or intelligence in any meaningful way. Not that this makes Big Brain a bad game, but the game lacks incentives to keep playing past simply getting a high score.

There is an incentive to try out multiplayer, however. Two players can compete using the full range of activities from the single-player game with a single cartridge using download play. It's a bit like a quick draw contest. Both players are given the same problems, one at a time, and answering first and fastest gains you extra points. You're able to see your progress relative to your opponent's via markers at the bottom of the screen, and each activity will add to your brain weight. The first one to inflate to a certain mind mass wins. If you have someone to play it with, it's something that adds a good deal to the package.

Big Brain scores points for its friendly and colorful art style and variety of activities, and there a lot of reasons prospective students will want to enroll. The problem is there's not much to keep you from dropping out after a few days. Since the game doesn't track your progress and rankings feel pretty random, the experience is more like going to a website and playing a dozen different flash games rather than putting yourself on the road to brain improvement. It's fun to get your brain big for a while, but don't expect the game to have the impact or staying power to hold up in the long run.