Casual Review writes: "In another take on the brain-training game genre, Brain Challenge offers 20 new and interesting brain challenges to test your cranial fitness. Does it deliver the goods on making you "more smarter and full of fancy book-learnin'?" Well, somewhat. But if you expect something as involved or addictive as Brain Age, prepare to be underwhelmed.
Let me get to this right off the bat, I don't know if it was a bug or a bad design choice, but I spent the first 5 minutes of this game trying to turn the sound on, and failed. Maybe this was one of the Brain Challenges: "Find the sound switch", or maybe not, but the creepy silence I played this game in made me terribly uncomfortable. I know most people turn the sound off in games after a while and play to their own MP3s, but give me the choice of listening to sound when I play. Please. And if there was supposed to be sound, please make sure the game starts with the sound on and make the switch easier to find."
If you've ever tried one of the many popular brain-training games on the Ds, you might understand my frustration. There are quite a few titles out there that claim to "train your brain" in just "minutes a day." Brain Age, Brain Boost, Brain Assist, Brain Challenge-the only requirement seems to be inserting the word "brain" into the title in order to instantly boost intelligence. Amy Nelson at Goozer Nation recently picked up Big Brain Academy from my kids' bottomless stash of Ds games (thanks Gramma)and thought, "Oh, I'll give this a try. Show the kids how it's done."
IGN writes: "If there was an abundance of DSiWare games on the market, then sure, I'd be all for porting older titles onto the service. But the fact is that this is one of the only games to come out this month in a catalog that is pretty weak so far. Granted, that's more of a complaint about the service, and doesn't affect the quality of the product. Still, why couldn't this have been Brain Challenge 2? If you've never ever played the game, then it's actually a pretty decent brain game, though when compared to the recently released DSiWare Brain Age, it's hard to recommend this over that".
This week, Cyril looks at a few retro titles for the Wii and DS. Some that he checks out this week are Pulseman, Secret Command, and Brain Challenge in Haiku style.
