The first Big Brain Academy game was released to promote the Nintendo DS Lite and later a sequel was released for the Nintendo Wii with the option to compare scores with others around the world. This series of games gives timed quizzes and puzzles to players in an effort to determine their brain mass. Comparisons with Brain Age were inevitable but between the two, Big Brain Academy takes your mental measurements less seriously, being more focused on playful jabs at the player's expense and pushing them towards earning high scores.
On September 2, 2021 a new installment named Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain was announced for Nintendo Switch with a release date of December 3, 2021. The sequel includes co-op play with two players competing at once along with the ability to post high score data online as ghost data.
Tropes
- Added Alliterative Appeal: Most (but not all) minigames are alliterative. For example, Mallet Math, Covered Cages, Fast Focus, Train Turn, Odd One Out and Tick-Tock Turn.
- Difficulty Levels: Three difficulties are present, but it's not settable for the Wii game's multiplayer.
- Dr. Brainpart: The game's appropriately named mascot, Dr. Lobe.
- Dynamic Difficulty: In the Wii version, the game's difficulty adjusts according to your current score.
- Ghost Leg Lottery: "Pathfinder" has a number of animals (more as the game gets more difficult) at the top of the screen. The player must draw one or more legs connecting the vertical lines so when the animals follow the paths downward, they all reach their partner of the same species waiting at the bottom of the screen.
- Fingerless Hands: Dr. Lobe, being a cartoony, vaguely-human-shaped thing, has hands that lack detail such as fingers.
- Harder Than Hard: Expert difficulty lives up to its name, being a huge step above Hard difficulty. As an example, Hard difficulty Balloon Burst introduces negative numbers. Expert mode adds in fractions as well as negatives. Brain vs. Brain takes it up even further with Elite and Super Elite difficulties.
- Minigame Game: Big Brain Academy has a bunch of games that are separated into 5 categories. Each minigame is simple to grasp, but can be tricky to complete correctly on higher difficulties.
- Memorize focuses on retaining information, and your ability to recall details.
- Visualize focuses on point of view puzzles, such as which angle an object is being perceived at.
- Identify focuses on sorting and figuring out what the answer is to the problem.
- Compute focuses on quick mental math, such as determining numbers from lowest to highest or adding up to a certain number.
- Analyze focuses determining conditions, such as which object is heavier or determining where blocks will fall.
- My Brain Is Big: Your score is determined in grams.
- Rank Inflation: Platinum Medals, which follow gold.
- Simon Says Minigame: Reverse Retention gives the player a sequence of objects/sounds to memorize. The catch is that the player must repeat the sequence backwards.
- Spot the Imposter: Odd One Out gives you four animations to observe. Three are identical, while one is different, and it's your job to find out which one is different.
- Speaking Simlish: Dr. Lobe's dialogue is perfectly readable, but the sounds produced are gibberish.
