March 11, 2008 - My brain is in a pretty sorry
state. It consistently lets me down at pub trivia nights, it rarely
remembers my relatives' birthdays (sorry, Mom), and so far it has
utterly failed at making me a million dollars. Now I know why.
According to Gameloft's new Xbox Live Arcade game Brain Challenge,
I'm only using about 6 percent of the mushy grey mass, 7 percent if I've just had lunch.

But Brain Challenge promises to help me turn my cognitive life around
by coaching me through a series of mental tests on a daily basis,
tracking my progress and encouraging me to improve along the way. It's
a formula that's worked well for Nintendo, which has sold millions of
copies of its Brain Age titles worldwide.

Gameloft jumped onto the brainwagon in 2006, debuting Brain Challenge
on mobile phones in 2006. The company released a version of the game
for Nintendo DS in January, and a 360 version hits Xbox Live Arcade on
Wednesday. Brain Challenge is the first brain training game to come to
Xbox Live Arcade, and it makes a solid entrance with its large variety
of minigames, endearing (albeit graphically unimpressive) training
doctors and progress tracking functions.


Must impress doctor lady...

The best thing about Brain Challenge (aside from the cute, fresh-faced doctors)
is its ability to track your daily progress, a la
Brain Age, in a variety of categories: logic, math, memory, visual and
focus. If you're the type who goes for self-improvement, you'll enjoy
loading up the game every day, taking the battery of tests and tracking
your long-term improvement (or decline, in my case).

If you're unhappy with your performance in a certain category, you can
pop into the Training Room to get some extra practice. Doing so will
also help you unlock additional minigames in each category. You'll be
graded on your performance in each game type, so no slacking unless you
want to see big, fat Ds next to each. There's a Stress Test, too, which
adds distractions and multitasking to the standard puzzles.

After each Daily Test, your friendly framerate-challenged coach will
show you a visual representation of your brain and the percentage of it
that you ostensibly used to complete the test. It's a humbling image
designed to entice you to keep coming back to the game for improvement.


Whether Brain Challenge actually improves anything about your brain is
an open question. By design, there are a limited number of game types,
and once you understand how they work and what it takes to score well,
it's just a matter of practice. So, basically, it's just like any other
game that rewards pattern recognition and trial and error. Does it
stimulate your brain and sharpen your thinking? Definitely. But does it
do so more than your typical puzzle game? Probably not.


Bouncy, bouncy.

Brain Challenge's main selling point is its format, which gives you a
nice variety of categories, individual games, play modes and unlockable
content. Spend enough time with Brain Challenge and you'll open up
different mini-games and a special Creative Mode for your efforts.
There's an adapted Kid Test and an unlockable Physical Test too
(although we didn't unlock it).

Although it's a nice addition to Xbox Live Arcade, Brain Challenge has
its, er, challenges. The tests are fairly well-designed but the opening
tutorials for each are a bit unclear, and it took me a few tries to
understand what I was up against in some cases. Maybe it's because we
use only grape-sized portions of our brains, but my fellow IGN editors
and I made more than a few false starts because of less-than-lucid
pre-test tutorials.

Brain Challenge's multiplayer mode is fun once or twice, but it's set
up like a card game in which each player takes turns solving puzzles to
receive points. To me, it would have been more fun to compete
head-to-head with my friends using the same sets of tests to see whose
brain was more gigantic. The card game system fell a bit flat, and I
don't see myself going back to the multiplayer mode very often.
Closing Comments
If you have
a puny, atrophied brain, spending some time with Brain Challenge will
make you feel better about it. The graphics aren't much to look at but
the menus are sharp and easy to navigate, and the controls are
intuitive. There are some issues with the tutorials and multiplayer,
but the basics of a decent educational puzzler are here.

IGN Ratings for Brain Challenge (X360)



RatingDescription

out of 10
6.5	Presentation Although the menus look sharp, the tutorials leave a bit to be desired.
6.0	Graphics Graphics are not Brain Challenge's strong suit. For being so woodenly animated, our lovely doctor's framerate was rough.
6.5	Sound There are a couple annoying songs here and there, but most of the music is perfectly passable.
7.0	Gameplay For a simple educational puzzle game, there's quite a bit of depth to Brain Challenge. It's fun to track your progress, even if it's to watch yourself get stupider at math.
7.5	Lasting Appeal Making your way through Brain Challenge could take a very, very long time. The multiplayer won't keep you coming back for more, but the Daily Test probably will.
7.2 Decent	OVERALL (out of 10 / not an average)