Big Brain Academy (Pre-E3 2006)

With its release next week, Nintendo's focused on promoting Brain Age for the Nintendo DS. However, we're likely to see much more of another title from Nintendo's brain training series at E3 next month.

Big Brain Academy releases on June 5th here in the US, and you can expect that Nintendo will promote it pretty seriously along with Brain Age. Nintendo's brain training series of games have been really popular in Japan, spurring plenty of interest from gamers and non-gamers alike, just as Nintendo has been talking about over the past year. The series is even fairly popular among Japanese adults.

Like Brain Age, Big Brain Academy gives the player a series of puzzle challenges in hopes that he or she will get smarter while having fun. The challenges found in Big Brain Academy have a different style from Brain Age though. They tend to a little faster paced.

Big Brain Academy has 15 activities that test you in five areas of mental ability: Think, Memorize, Analyze, Compute, and Identify. After a series of challenges, you'll be presented with a score given as the weight of your brain. You can also see your strength or weakness in each of the five categories. The game may also suggest what kind of career suits you or even compare your mind to that of a famous figure. Your statistics will be saved so that you can see how you improve over time.

Big Brain Academy has a more significant multiplayer mode than Brain Age does. Up to eight players can play simultaneously with just one game card. After a set number of challenges are complete, the players are ranked according to how well they performed.

We'll be at E3 less than a month from now and you can bet we'll find out more about Big Brain Academy along with plenty of other new Nintendo DS titles.