Big Brain is another title in the arsenal of the "Touch Generations" series - games that are meant for all ages and don't require previous video game skills to be good at. It's also another addition to the new wave of Brain-training games, except this time it's on a console instead of a handheld system. It's new focus on multiplayer drags down the single-player effort, which makes it hard to justify a $50 price tag.

WarioWare meets BrainAge. That's the best description I can give to explain this game. You must complete a long series of quick micro-games to determine the weight of your brain - the bigger the better. The micro-games are not like the ridiculously crazy games you'll find in WarioWare, where not knowing what the heck is even going on is the majority of the entertainment. Big Brain actually wants you to understand what you're doing. In doing so, they don't have the gigantic library of 200 mini-games to choose from, because they don't want someone else to have an advantage for having played the game more. Instead, there are only 15 different micro-games (or what I like to call "micro-puzzles").

After taking my first test to determine how big my brain is, I quickly realized I had just played through every micro-puzzle there was to offer. It wasn't that I had just played through each one once in the first fifteen minutes, but that I had played through all fifteen of them three times each. Talk about getting dull real fast.

It was this initial feeling of having seen it all that left me very worried and incredibly bitter about the game. It took a few hours before I finally understood why there were so few puzzles. This game is not about trying to overwhelm the player with strange challenges you don't see coming, but to get them experienced with each puzzle and then rack up the difficulty. What I realized was that no matter how experienced you were in a micro-puzzle, the expert difficulty would always make each time you play a serious challenge. This is where the replay value started to pour in: you must practice, practice, practice in order to really get a good grade. It is not easy stuff. For example, take the micro-puzzle above. Popping from lowest to highest isn't all that difficult, but by the time you get comfortable with it, expert mode comes poking its ugly head up and each balloon is no longer a whole number but a fraction. Nothing's more horrific for me than trying to pop fractions from lowest to highest as fast as I can.

Even by this point I was still a little unhappy with the game. Sure I could try to earn gold medals in each difficulty (and then drop my head in shame when I realize there are also platinum medals), but I didn't enjoy the way the gameplay was organized. For example, BrainAge only allowed you to take your test once a day - forcing you to really try your best, and graphing your progress over the course of the month against all your friends. In Big Brain, however, you can take as many tests as you want, and only saves your high-score. They really should have included graphs! It was so much fun to see how your day to day skills stacked up against your family over time!