Raising the IQ
Join the Big Brain Academy in Nintendo’s second homework game
With all three of Nintendo’s innovative games designed to improve your mental smarts selling over a million copies in Japan, the company’s clearly keen to get them into the hands of old age pensioners the world over. And hot on the heels of Professor Kawashiwa’s Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? comes the announcement of the second in the series, Big Brain Academy.
It may sound like Big Brother meets dating agency for geeks Mensa (actually, that’s not a bad idea for a reality TV show!), but in reality Big Brain Academy involves typically game-like challenges, pitched at a more arcade-style pace than the gentle approach explored in Professor Kawashiwa’s Brain Training.
In Big Brain Academy you have to complete intelligence tests such as pattern recognition, puzzles and maths tricks in the quickest possible time. There are 15 different activities, each of which takes about a minute to finish.
There will be a Practice mode, so you can get to grips with the sort of problems that will be thrown at you, but in the Test mode, it’s all about getting the solution in the fastest possible time. There’s also a Versus mode, so you and up to seven others can compete, taking turns on one DS, with each person’s score shown in a brain weight chart.
Nintendo’s yet to confirm a release date for Big Brain Academy but we’d expect it to be around April or May.
