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Nintendo: Wii Reviews

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Review

Big Brain Academy For Wii

72%

Format Nintendo Wii

Developer Nintendo

Publisher Nintendo

Genre Mini Games

7-Jan-2008 Prepare to flex your grey matter! It's time to go back to the classroom

2 Comments

No game succeeds in making you feel like you're a total loser quite as successfully Big Brain Academy For Wii. If you lose in a multiplayer game of Mario Kart you can use all manner of excuses. Here, if you fail to recognise that a space rocket is faster than a bike, there's no one to blame but yourself.

Although there are different games this time, the premise is the same as the DS version. There are more areas to test your brain (analyse, visualise, memorise, compute and identify) in the single player modebut there are only three games in each, meaning that once you've had one run through there is nothing else to do other than improve your score.

There is no incentive to keep on playing as the games are particularly uninspiring. You'll be doing things like picking the odd one out from four pictures, popping numbered balloons and using a spotlight to count animals. It's challenging but none of them use the Remote in an interesting way.

Train Your Brain
Big Brain Academy is saved from the exclusion room by three very good multiplayer modes. When you've got someone sat next to you threatening
to show you up as a complete dunce, it suddenly becomes a matter of pride as you battle to pop those balloons in record time in order to save face in Mind Sprint.

Mental Marathon is more of a team effort as players work together to complete tests but the best of the lot is the brilliant Brain Quiz. This is set on a board with each square being a brain game. When a player chooses one the game randomly selects the difficulty level, so if you get an easy game you need to make sure you take full advantage by getting a high score.

The biggest problem with this game is that whereas its DS cousin can warrant asking for £20, Big Brain Academy doesn't present anywhere near enough value for money to justify its £35 price point. So despite succeeding in what it sets out to do, we can only really recommend this to fans of the genre.

Tom East

This could provide an afternoon of quality entertainment for a bunch of friends but if you are looking for something that'll improve your mind go for Dr Kawashima on DS.