Review: Big Brain Academy Wii Degree
Overview: Ok this one's gonna be fairly short because there's not a whole lot to this game. Nintendo's trying to take its success with casual gaming and thinking puzzles from the DS over to the Wii. Casual gaming is shaping up to be the Wii's bread and butter, so taking Big Brain Academy to it is fairly appropriate. The jist is pretty simple. You register your Mii in the Academy and then do some quick paced brain teasers.
Shininess: Meh, I almost don't even feel the need to bother with this category for this game. It's bright and colorful and has some sounds. Whoopee. It uses the Wiimote's internal speaker a bit more than the average game, but not much. It is kinda quirky, though. You're not doing anything significant with little brain teaser mini-games, so there doesn't even need to be a focus on graphics. They don't look like crap, and that's really all you need.
Funness: This game was fun for me the first time through, but that's it. Once you've got yourself set up with your Mii in the game, there's only a few things you can do. You can do the test, which gives you a brain weight rating and grade based on your performance in the mini-games. The mini-games are in groups of three, categorized as Identify, Memorize, Visualize, Analyze, and Compute. For example: In the Memorize group, you'll be shown a sequence of numbers or sounds or pictures, and then you have to list them back in reverse order. In the Compute group, you will see a group of numbered baloons, and you have to pop them in ascending order. Pretty basic, right? Yup.
If you get bored with the test, you can do the group games, which are just the mini-games arranged in different ways. The Mind Sprint has you race through a set number of challenges, either against another team or against the clock. The Mental Marathon has you do as many challenges as possible in a limited time without missing one. And the Brain Quiz has teams take turns picking challenges from a game board on random difficulties and then you get points on how many you completed.
And that's it. Nothing else to it. That's the entire game.
Worthiness: For people like myself, this game is not worth the money at all. We'll get bored of it very quickly and never pick it up again. The only demographic I can see this being successful with at all would be families with young kids. It's probably a great game for parents to sit down with their grade school children and play a silly thinking game together. If you're really concerned about the games your kids play, this is a good one for them. But they might get bored of it pretty quickly unless you turn it into a family fun night type thing.
Even if you're a part of that demographic, this game should be a budget title, and it's not. 50 clams for Big Brain Academy Wii Degree is very, very stiff. I predict very few people are going to get their money's worth out of this game.
Score: 1/5 Put it down and walk away slowly.
