Nintendo Okie

• Cute characters
• Quirky situations
• Nice difficulty ramp up
• Trophies

See Ya’:

• Older players may be bored by the repetition
• Only 15 mini games

The DS really set the stage for the explosion of brain training software that has tried to get people to stimulate their minds through video games. In 2008 Grubby Games decided to bring their brain stimulating software, appropriately titled The Amazing Brain Train, to the PC and did so in award winning fashion by becoming a 2008 Pax 10 award winner.

This WiiWare version of that PC game has you, as Professor Fizzwizzle traveling the world helping animals by completing tasks for them. Some of them involve helping sick animals to feel well, while others have you bringing two love struck animals together. To do this you travel along a rail line on a train that is fueled by the power of your brain. In order to refuel your vehicle you have to complete a series of mini games that are designed to challenge your brain in one of five areas; Planning, Spatial Recognition, Numbers, Memory and Search. These different categories will have you performing different tasks based on that skill. For example, Search has you placing Tetris style playing pieces onto a grid to fill the space completely. Planning has you doing things like placing mirrors to reflect a beam of light to warm up freezing penguins.

The game play is accompanied by inviting visuals that appeal directly to a younger audience. All of the characters are cute, colorful cartoon animals that have silly names like Rocky the Penguin or Skippy the Frog. The quests they’ll have you going on are just as silly as the characters themselves. For example, Rory the Tiger has gotten ill and needs you to travel to other animals looking for a box of tissues, an orange and a bowl of soup to help cure him of his cold. Skippy the Frog has a crush on Blanche the Hippo and you have to help him win her heart. The game’s soundtrack is just as whimsical and if you’re not careful you may find yourself humming along to the “overworld” tune.

In appealing towards a younger audience the game may feel older gamers feeling a bit bored after only a few minutes. There are 15 mini games in total, 10 of which are unlocked from the very beginning. They all start off simple enough. You’re given a time limit to perform the required task as many times as you can. These all start out with just a very simple version of the task, but will get progressively harder. This gives younger players the feeling that they’re really accomplishing things if they begin to go farther and farther into each game, but older gamers may get bored by doing the same things over and over again. In order to appeal to the older gamers there are 32 trophies that you can collect by doing well. Many of the trophies are based around obtaining a certain score in different games, but there are also trophies that are earned for travelling a certain distance and that will get people playing the game again and again to get these trophies if they like to collect these in game achievements.

There are a leaderboards as well that you can use to see how well you’re doing against other players, but these are all limited to local play only. In this day and age there’s not much reason that game’s that include leaderboards can’t have them online so you can see how you’re doing against your friends.

All in all The Amazing Brain Train is a lot of fun and is a nice diversion for a few minutes if you’re looking to help increase your brain size. Younger gamers will be drawn to the cute characters and quirky stories that accompany them, while older gamers will certainly be playing to collect the trophies. The inclusion of some multiplayer competition would have been a nice addition to this quirky collection of mini games. There’s not much to the difficulty, but you might be surprised just how much you enjoy the characters this game offers.

Final Score: 3/5 Average

Review copy of the game provided by NinjaBee.