Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii)

Gamecow’s Price	RRP $69.95     Save $7.00 $62.95
Availability
Genre	General: Puzzle
Platform	Nintendo Wii
Release Date	08/11/2007
Rated

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree has everything you need to give your brain a good workout.  Players of any ages will be challenged with the puzzles.  Big Brain Academy really comes into its own when you are playing against other players.  The action is fast and furious and you may even find yourself working up a sweat.

Wii Degree is a great game for the family to play against one another.  Who is the smartest in your home?

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii) Product Information

The Wi sequel to Big Brain Academy for Nintendo DS includes three multiplayer modes for up to eight players. Players also can exchange student-record books with other players over WiiConnect24 and compete against their save data.

With 15 new activities that challenge the brain in single-player Test and Practice modes, Big Brain Academy for Wii sees how players measure up in five categories: Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Compute and Visualize. All activities are designed around the Wii Remote's pointer. Players can play solo with one Wii Remote, take on a friend with another remote, or pass remotes around like a relay baton in group competitions. Who in the family has the biggest brain?

The activities in Big Brain Academy for Wii are fun minigames with a ton of variety, and they're meant to be played rapid-fire for a short time as players push their brains to do more than they did the day before. 

When players start a new game, they'll meet the whimsical Dr. Lobe, who will suggest that they take on the Test mode challenge: playing all 15 activities that span the five brainy categories. He'll tell players how big their brain is based on how well they did and how fast they did it. He'll encourage players to take the Test often and to use Practice mode to beef up their skills in all 15 of the activities. Practice mode also offers three difficulty levels for each activity, and Dr. Lobe will award several medals for high achievement in each one.

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii) Review

Nintendo's Brain Age and Big Brain titles have combined sold more than one-hundred ga-trillion copies on the company's dual-screened handheld. All right, a slight exaggeration, but these games were unpredictable hits, appealing to all types of buyers with mental challenges that could only loosely be described as gameplay by traditional standards. And unlike so many of the graphical powerhouses that are here Monday and gone Tuesday, these simple brain puzzles -- designed to "expand the audience," says the Big N whenever it possibly can -- have legs. Their appeal doesn't thin and disappear with age because, like Tetris, their mechanics are timeless, and as a result you may still find a DS brain game in the Top 25 best-sellers list a year after its release.

Wii Degree is also unmistakably redesigned for the Big N's home system and in contrast to a game like Cooking Mama, using the Wii remote to solve the puzzles never feels awkward or clunky. Rather, it feels great -- it's incredibly tactile and responsive. In addition, Big Brain on Wii comes complete with some very engaging mental challenges (many of them completely original) and a highly enjoyable multiplayer mode -- arguably one of Wii's best, particularly if you want a Wii Sports-like experience.

The Wii game features only a disappointing handful of modes and you will inevitably learn that the title is best played with friends. If you've got none, you can still go solo and test your brain on a daily basis, which is still fun, but you'll be missing out on one of the console version's biggest advantages, which is the two-player simultaneous play or up to eight-player trade-off play, both robust and addictive. You'll begin the game with a test, which ranks your brain in five categories, from identify and visualize to compute, memorize and analyse.
Wii Degree really tries to use the Wii remote's pitiful Hallmark card-quality internal speaker. We give the developer credit. There's a mini-game where you have to hold the remote up to your ear as though it were a phone. Then a voice calls out various food orders into your ear and you have to quickly point at the screen and select the items in the correct order. It is compared to all of the other entries very uninspired and it actually becomes boring after the initial novelty of listening to orders with the controller wears off.

The game is at its best when you're playing with one or more friends because fast-paced split-screen mental battles ensue. In our experience, anybody in the room will call out answers and give back seat guidance, just as people will shout and laugh as the matches grow more frenzied. Wii Degree utilizes two remotes for split-screen play and unfortunately it doesn't support four-player simultaneous action. You can, however, trade the two controllers between friends for matches that support up to eight players, even going so far as to create teams. Trading your controller between a partner as you both scramble to quickly solve puzzles before your competition can successfully up the sense of urgency that the game effortlessly spits out.

Closing Comments

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree is largely a success, which makes it -- like Wii Sports -- a surprisingly difficult project to rate. As everyone knows, the title falls into the emerging "casual" sector -- a target demographic less concerned with graphics and more concerned with accessibility, or so we're told. From that perspective, the title is great -- it is both easy to pick up and really fun to play, especially with friends.

What Wii Degree demonstrates is that Nintendo really has the magic touch when it comes to the utilization of its remote. Very few third party titles incorporate that tangible, tactile responsiveness -- the sensitive controller rumble you feel when you're navigating menus in Wii Sports, for example. Wii Degree is fun to play partly because you really feel like you're reaching out and touching the puzzles and objects in the game with Nintendo's controller. That sense of polish goes a long way. Of course, it's also fun because the puzzles themselves are smartly developed and very engaging, if not downright hard. I swear, every time I encounter the bird cages I want to pull my hair out.

Full review IGN