Nintendo is ready to make you feel stupid
At least, that's how I felt playing Big Brain Academy at E3, but I'm sure my low score had something to do with the outrageous noise and abundance of booth babes. Anyway, Nintendo's followup to Brain Age is hitting shelves, and I'm sure it'll make a great Father's Day gift. Coupled with the sexxaay new DS Lite, who can say no to a little exercise for the mental muscle?
Quick -- which weighs more,
three snails or a ladybug? How much is seven plus nine plus four? And was that sequence of sounds
you just heard baby-baby-girl or girl-baby-baby? (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050516/NINTENDODSLOGO ) Nintendo's new Big Brain Academy(TM) challenges players with a series of
wacky mental tests in areas such as thinking, memorization, computation, analysis and
identification. Players complete as many of these tasks as possible in 60 seconds as the
difficulty level rises. Big Brain Academy, the second installment in Nintendo's wildly popular
brain-training series, launched June 5 exclusively for Nintendo DS(TM). In Big Brain Academy,
users encounter a series of 15 different tests that involve use of the Nintendo DS touch screen.
Activities include counting the number of blocks in a stack, matching pairs of colorful panels and
deducing which object on a set of scales weighs the most. Big Brain Academy then rates users'
performances by giving them a letter grade, suggesting a career option based on their areas of
strength and assigning their in-game brain a weight. The better the score, the heavier the brain.
Brain training has become a worldwide phenomenon. The three software titles in the Nintendo DS
series have sold more than 6 million copies in Japan. The first brain-training software, Brain
Age(TM): Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, went on sale in the United States on April 17. Up to
eight DS owners can compete wirelessly in multiplayer games, even if only one person has a game
card. It will be sold under Nintendo's new Touch Generations brand, which encompasses titles that
anyone can pick up and play, even with little or no experience with playing video games. It
represents Nintendo's ongoing commitment to expand the world of video games to new audiences. Big
Brain Academy is Rated E for Everyone. For more information about Big Brain Academy, please
visit BigBrainAcademy.com.
