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IGN Review of Brain Boost: Beta Wave
Had Nintendo not discovered how well received its Brain Age and Big Brain Academy turned out on the Nintendo DS system, Majesco wouldn't have dared released Brain Boost six months later. The appearance of these two games is merely the company jumping on the bandwagon, and clearly the company's trying to ride the wave of success that Nintendo's seen with its early 2006 releases. Had Majesco also followed the design formula, perhaps the games would have ended up just as good, but these games were clearly rushed to market to hit that blazed trail as quickly as possible. The games aren't nearly as fulfilling as Nintendo's designs, only offering a bare minimum of brain teasing exercises with very little in the way of variety or progress tracking.
Brain Boost attempts to draw the Brain Age/Big Brain Academy by touting that the game's been endorsed by a renowned Japanese brain researcher -- where Nintendo recruited the help of Ryuta Kawashima to build its mind exercising design, Majesco hit up Makoto Shichida for Brain Boost. It's obviously a name drop, so don't expect to be impressed unless you're one of the few people who bought his books off of Amazon.com.
Beta Wave focuses on concentration challenges: trying to spot matching objects quickly, or counting bubbles that move and overlap. Gamma Wave's expertise is in memorization, where all of the games are revolved around seeing a set pattern and trying to remember what it was. All of the games are multiple choice and require nothing more than answering a question with four options, twenty times. You're ranked at the end of the 20 questions by how many you got right, but the game never really tracks progress or offers an engaging challenge progression like Nintendo's "brain" series -- there's simply four different difficulty levels of the same games, and that's it. What are two products really should have been one.
Majesco released Brain Boost in two flavors: Beta Wave and Gamma Wave, but the only thing that separates the two games are the five different challenges in the packs. Presentation, menus, music, visuals, and interface are identical between to dual packs. Even the unnecessary introduction that tells the tale of visiting faraway planets is recycled between each pack with only a bare minimum of text altered in the Xeroxing of the game. By separating the two, Majesco's allowing gamers to buy a game that focuses on a specific area of the brain, but in reality, it's clearly a ploy to milk two games out of a single development. And by separating the two, it weakens what could've been a solid single pack since each game now only has five different challenges instead of one game having ten.
The challenges in Brain Boost are about as exciting as an Iowa Test, and though the developers try to spice things up with characters and a story and some goofy flair, they don't do enough to make these mundane challenges "fun." Beyond a score displayed next to your name, there's nothing to shoot for beyond that higher score in the harder difficulty setting...and when the tests aren't all that interesting to begin with, it's hard to grab the gamer's attention by making the dull even more difficult to play.
©2006-11-27, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Brain Boost attempts to draw the Brain Age/Big Brain Academy by touting that the game's been endorsed by a renowned Japanese brain researcher -- where Nintendo recruited the help of Ryuta Kawashima to build its mind exercising design, Majesco hit up Makoto Shichida for Brain Boost. It's obviously a name drop, so don't expect to be impressed unless you're one of the few people who bought his books off of Amazon.com.
Beta Wave focuses on concentration challenges: trying to spot matching objects quickly, or counting bubbles that move and overlap. Gamma Wave's expertise is in memorization, where all of the games are revolved around seeing a set pattern and trying to remember what it was. All of the games are multiple choice and require nothing more than answering a question with four options, twenty times. You're ranked at the end of the 20 questions by how many you got right, but the game never really tracks progress or offers an engaging challenge progression like Nintendo's "brain" series -- there's simply four different difficulty levels of the same games, and that's it. What are two products really should have been one.
Majesco released Brain Boost in two flavors: Beta Wave and Gamma Wave, but the only thing that separates the two games are the five different challenges in the packs. Presentation, menus, music, visuals, and interface are identical between to dual packs. Even the unnecessary introduction that tells the tale of visiting faraway planets is recycled between each pack with only a bare minimum of text altered in the Xeroxing of the game. By separating the two, Majesco's allowing gamers to buy a game that focuses on a specific area of the brain, but in reality, it's clearly a ploy to milk two games out of a single development. And by separating the two, it weakens what could've been a solid single pack since each game now only has five different challenges instead of one game having ten.
The challenges in Brain Boost are about as exciting as an Iowa Test, and though the developers try to spice things up with characters and a story and some goofy flair, they don't do enough to make these mundane challenges "fun." Beyond a score displayed next to your name, there's nothing to shoot for beyond that higher score in the harder difficulty setting...and when the tests aren't all that interesting to begin with, it's hard to grab the gamer's attention by making the dull even more difficult to play.
©2006-11-27, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved