Much like WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (BBA) gives the player an opportunity to test their skill in a variety of minigames. Unlike WarioWare, however, BBA will leave a far better taste in the mouth of the typical player as there is no true “end” to the game, which is designed to keep users coming back for small sessions every day.
The game starts in the classroom, where the interesting-looking peanut-shaped headmaster welcomes you to the class and bids you follow him to the office for a proper registration. The game allows you to choose any of the miis that are on your console to “enroll” in the academy, simply meaning that their progress will be tracked and their bright, shiny faces will show up on all of the record boards. After registration, the headmaster implores you to take a preliminary test of your brain’s power so that the comparison game can begin. He also mentions that there are practice sessions to master for every mini-game in the academy, a pursuit which I would highly recommend familiarizing yourself with before you begin the actual test.
The academy’s mini-games are divided into 5 categories: Identify, Visualize, Memorize, Compute, and Analyze. Each is designed to work with a different part of your brain in order to make that part stronger. Each category has 3 mini-games (with an additional mini-game per category which can be unlocked later), and each mini-game has 3 skill levels (again, with an “Expert” skill level to be unlocked upon mastery of the first three).
While the categories themselves are fairly self-explanatory, the games within the categories are extremely creative, and make excellent use of the strongest feature of the wii remote: pointing and clicking. There are some (very few) games that use the wii remote other than as a device for picking things on screen, so for anyone comfortable with a laser pointer can focus on training their brain rather than figuring out the subtle details of movement for this game. This is a very attractive feature, because the games are hard enough on their own.
The game includes an excellent multiplayer mode, called “Group” mode, which also has three modes of play: Mind Sprint, Mental Marathon, and Brain Quiz. In the first, two or more players are competing in real-time to see who can complete the most mini-games in the shortest amount of time. The players pick a number of games, a skill level (or auto, which picks the skill based on the mii you’re using) and then compete to see who can finish first. I played it with one other person, and cutting the screen in half didn’t really have a big impact on the difficulty of the games, but I can see the screen being divided into fourths a significant setback in this mode.
In Mental Marathon, up to 8 people play with one controller to see how many mini-games in a row they can successfully complete. The wii remote (or “baton” as it’s called, since it’s a relay game) is passed among the players every 3 games. When one player fails, the total number of successful games is calculated up to that point, and the headmaster gives you a good haranguing if you weren’t quite up to par. This mode is fun, but very frustrating unless you’re playing with people who are all equally good at all of the mini-games.
Brain Quiz is my personal favorite multiplayer mini-game. In this game, a number of images are laid out in a grid-pattern on the screen, and each player is allowed to pick a square in turn to attempt the mini-game on that square. A time limit is given, and the player is allowed to play the game until either the time runs out or a mini-game is failed. Each square has a difficulty level, chosen at random. Other squares have a “x2″ multiplier, which turns up the competitive aspect of the game a little bit.
The main aspect of this entire game, though, is the single-player “Testing” center in which you engage in a variety of minigames. The results of these games is combined into a composite score, which is used to calculate the “weight” of your brain. More weight translates into more brain power, which is a good metric as far as simplicity goes. All of the mini-games are rated on speed, accuracy, and percent of completion (a player can fail a certain mini-game or round of that mini-game and still receive partial credit for their efforts). The crowning glory of Big Brain Academy is that while the game is very short and you can get a solid understanding of every single mini-game in the course of a couple of hours, playing for small periods of time every day (perhaps one test in the morning and one test in the evening) is supposed to yield very strong results when practised in the long-term. This gives the game the solid long-term appeal that many games these days just don’t have. Being able to compare your results to your friends, and knowing that some wise-guy who stays at home all day practising to beat you is, for the most part, a waste of time gives this same a very re-playable value. There’s nothing quite like tracking your progress over time to keep you coming back for more.
The game weights your brain from 0-3000, using a weight from every category in its calculation. This weight is translated into a letter grade based on the distribution of your scores among the different categories. The professor explains to you that the average student gets a score of 1400 after having played the game for one week on a daily basis, but first timers could expect a score of around 750. The headmaster’s own score? 1990! He makes a point of telling you this. Beating the headmaster doesn’t seem like much of a feat, given that I was able to get my score to almost 1700 after only 2 hours of play. I suppose the valuable information here is not what one person can do against the headmaster, but what one person can do against their friends. That’s why I was excited to learn that you can send a report card from any of your miis to any wiifriend you have that is totally registered (you’ve registered them, AND they’ve registered you). I haven’t seen what this looks like, but I am damn sure that if I were to wake up with a solid score from a friend in my message area, I would have a strong incentive to push myself to beat it.
Graphically, this game is nothing special. But then, who expected it to be? This is a wii-game at its very core, and it’s hit that core with conviction. The game uses all of the strengths of the wii console and the wii remote, and nothing more could be asked for. With its emphasis on mini-games and replayability, this is the WarioWare that should have been (although a comparison between the two still seems somewhat superficial). The Audio is clean and soothing, giving a nice calm music during the lobby screen and accurate sound effects through the speakers and the wii remote during gameplay. The only qualm I have about this game is that the game itself is so short. Once you’ve mastered all 15 of the original minigames, there isn’t much left to go except just get faster at beating them. I wonder if the brain is agile enough to become better-trained by playing a mere 15 games in the long-term?
Graphics: 6/10
Sound: 7/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Re-playability: 10/10
Value: 8/10
Overall: 8.0
Note: The overall score is not calculated as an average of the component parts. See our review calculation section for more information.
