While there's no shortage of brain training games on the market, the Xbox Live Marketplace is still surprisingly light on the genre. Brain Challenge could have potentially tapped into a huge casual market. Sadly, the game never lives up to that potential, due to a poor shift of the product from its phone origins to the console. It doesn't take a whole lot of brain power to figure out that this is one title best left on the shelf.
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.
