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Nintendo UK wheels out the celebs ...
... with mixed results. But let's start with the good ones: Patrick Stewart will be back this Christmas to sell the DS and Brain Training to Brits (as he was last year), and he'll be doing it alongside Julie Walters. Hurray! The rest of Nintendo's celebrity line-up will be quite obscure to Americans, but when they produce lifestyle photography as brilliant as this, who the hell cares? They include: Girls Aloud. British girl pop group, and actually a pretty big name in Blighty. Most famous member is one Cheryl Cole, who seems lovely and sincere on X Factor, though isn't quite as pleasant if you meet her in a nightclub toilet. Fern Britton, once-cuddly, now gastric-band-wearing TV presenter, will be advertising Cooking Guide. Ronan Keating, one-fifth of Irish boyband Boyzone. Incidentally, in the process of writing this post, we discovered Boyzone were reforming. Ugh. Anyway, Ronan will be promoting Big Brain Academy. Jamie and Louise Redknapp, slightly thick but good-looking soccer pundit and his former pop star wife. Will join forces with their extended family to push Mario Kart Wii, Wii Sports, and Super Smash Bros.: Brawl. That's a lot of responsibility on the Redknapps' shoulders! We hope they're up to it. And going by Nintendo's current record in the UK, they'll probably do really well. Best of luck to all of them.
Another Week in Europe
Featuring charts from across the region, Another Week in Europe documents the buying habits and quirky tastes of a whole continent of Wii lovers.UK consumers have looked high. They've looked low. And they've reached their verdict: there isn't a better pair of Wii games than Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games and ... Game Party. As a polished, slick, licensed product, we can totally understand (and almost support) Mario & Sonic doing well (it came second to Army of Two), but Game Party? Could this be the same Game Party that averages a whopping 23% on GameRankings, and which achieved a heady top score of 32% from IGN? It is? Way to go, Britain!Beyond the top ten, Carnival: Funfair Games makes it to 16th place (and there's more where that came from), Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity and Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree sit in 31st and 37th spot respectively, and we weep into our keyboards for the future of the country.Meanwhile, consumers in mainland Europe are also all over the plumber and the hedgehog, with the Wii version of Mario & Sonic registering top ten positions in the Netherlands and Spain, and sharing top spot in Ireland with the DS edition. Wii Play even makes an appearance in the Spanish and German charts, as it rolls cheerfully towards world domination.Hit the break for a sprinkling of European charts!
UK found their brainiest family
Remember back when we told you Nintendo was looking for families in the UK to try their hand at Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree? Well, turns out they found their family in the Chouhan family from Leicester, who recently won the event in London. They ended up walking away with £20,000 to put toward University fees. Nice! Karen, 50, daughter Chhaya, 17 and son Amar, 10, won the contest by getting the highest score out of all the participants. The family plans on splitting the money, by using £10,000 to pay for Chhaya's University fees and setting aside the remaining money into a trust fund for son Amar. "We're both amazed and speechless. This is such an amazing prize and Chhaya and Amar will benefit so much from the free university fees," says Karen. Congratulations to the winning family! %Gallery-3434% [Via Go Nintendo]
Nintendo on the hunt for Brits with brains
Nintendo's latest marketing campaign contest across the pond has British families tossing their hats into the ring to see who's the best collective unit at Big Brain Academy. Families only need to report to one of these locations on the date listed, get up on stage and take their turn. Those who perform the best will then head on to the next stage of the contest, hoping to win university tuition, Wii consoles and 7-day holiday trips. Are you and your family going to participate? [Via IGN]
Are you smarter than Nintendo marketing?
This season, the Canadian version of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, cleverly titled Are You Smarter than a Canadian 5th Grader, will feature something extra for players to determine whether they are smarter than: Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. Not only will demo stations be set up at the casting calls, the game will actually be highlighted in the show itself. The $25,000 question is being renamed the "Big Brain Academy Question," for example. In addition, the press release mentions that "the show will include other exciting hallmark features of the game." That probably means that some of the minigames from the Wii game will make their way into TV game show format, with the added component of being tested against the equivalent (due to exchange rate) of an American 4.724th grader.
Tell Nintendo your Big Brain Academy opinions, get free keychain
You could just make up your opinions just for the free keychain, but we wouldn't condone that sort of thing. No, we're a very anti-lies and anti-deception kind of outfit here at Wii Fanboy. We just like to keep it real like that, as the kids say. So, instead give Nintendo your honest thoughts on the game and get a free keychain. it's a win-win situation! How do you get your hands on this tiny little Wiimote, exactly? Well, all you need to do is: Sign up for My Nintendo Register your copy of Big Brain Academy Wii Degree Take a survey Confirm your address ??? Profit! Who's going to get their hands on this keychain?
Metareview: Big Brain Academy
With the release of Big Brain Academy Wii Degree, many have found something fresh to play on their Wii. With the prospect of new titles on the regular becoming smaller and smaller as the months wear on (until August 20th, that is), many were hoping that Big Brain Academy could fill that empty void in their life. According to critics, that just isn't happening as the game has a variety of different issues. IGN (76/100) thinks the game has a long way to go to perfection: "You're going to have fun here, but in three or four years we'll look back at this game and it will pale by comparison to its inevitable sequels." GameSpot (73/100) says it's still just a collection of minigames: "Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree is a simple collection of brain teasers that are different enough from the other minigame collections on the Wii to make it worth playing." Yahoo! Games (70/100) says the game costs too much: "Big brains are certainly desirable, but big price tags are a different matter, and Wii Degree's standard $49.99 asking price is a little hard to stomach. While the game is tons of fun, there's just a handful of minigames and not much else, which puts it in a different class to other full-priced options." GameDaily (70/100) is of the mind that the game needed more minigames: "It needed more minigames and a livelier presentation, but gamers will enjoy the multiplayer options and gameplay innovations." Any of you out there pick the game up and want to offer your opinions?
Friday Video: Massive NMS round-up edition
The Nintendo Media Summit may not have offered up the huge news, but it did give us one thing that's awesome -- a metric ton (less than a megaton) of trailers for all the games we'll be playing in the coming months. So we thought it might be a good week for a very special video spotlight, and instead of one or two videos, we'll hook you up with several. Dare we even say many? See for yourself after the jump.
NMS: Big Brain Academy hands-on
Our friends over at Joystiq have already started enacting nefarious plans against us, planned with their newly enlarged brains. The tiny-brains at Wii Fanboy don't stand a chance against the bigness of their horrible brains. How did Joystiq get such big old brains? They got a hands-on preview of Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. And even with their freakishly enlarged brains, they were positive about the game. It contains a series of minigames, each designed to improve one mental ability (Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Compute and Visualize) as well as presumably being fun. In addition to 8-player games at home, you can trade student profiles online to compete with your friends. Check out the screenshots in our People on the Couch Gallery! %Gallery-3434%
Nintendo Media Summit: Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree hands-on (Wii)
The sequel to the DS hit, Big Brain Academy, was shown this week at the Nintendo Media Summit. Dubbed Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, this version offers tons of new mini-games to test your senses and give your brain a workout. It supports three multiplayer modes for up to 8 players, and 15 new challenges for single-player mode. It also allows you to trade your student data over WiiConnect24 with other players, allowing you to challenge others and compare results. In a nice touch, the game also imports all your friend's codes automatically. The gameplay is focused on fast-paced small minigames that are meant to help you increase your mental capacities in one of five areas: Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Computer and Visualize. The game tracks your progress and gives you a diagram showing your strengths and weakness in the different categories. To improve a poor stat, you need to play games specific to that category. For example, if your Identify skill is low, you could play "Fast Focus," in which you see a distorted image slowly revealed. The point of the game is to correctly guess the subject of the picture as quickly as you can, using the Wiimote to select the answer from a provided list. "Fast Focus" was probably my favorite of the minigames, but unfortunately I saw quite a few images repeat after only playing it for a short time. Kind of a bad sign for the longevity of that particular minigame, but may have just been a fluke. %Gallery-3406%
Non-games selling non-poorly in Japan
It's no secret that Japan has got Brain Age on the brain. Brain Age and its sequel, which was just now (kind of) announced for the US, have broken all kinds of sales records and been pretty much the sole motivator for the insane success of the DS. But what is less well-known is that, in addition to driving the creation of a ton of copycat software, training fever is pervasive enough to drive sales of that stuff. In other words, Brain Age has created a market for non-games, just like Nintendo hoped it would.Gpara compiled a list of 95 DS non-games ordered by Media Create sales numbers, and NeoGAFfer Jonnyram has translated the first ten. These things don't cost much to make, and they are bringing in stacks of money. That's Economics Training at work. Or it would be if that existed. Give it a couple of weeks. Brain Age 2: 4,266,000 Brain Age: 3,403,000 Eigo Zuke (English Training): 1,937,000 Big Brain Academy 1,519,000 General Knowledge Training/Common Sense Training:1,381,000 Cooking Navi: 815,000 Kanji Test: 523,000 Tokoton Kanji Brain: 406, 000 IQ Suppli DS: 219,000 [Via NeoGAF]
Get a degree in knowing how to play Big Brain Academy
We haven't read any research on the particular brain-embiggening properties of Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, and we're also quite certain that playing it won't result in an actual degree conferral (which is too bad, because we could use some more of those!) Whatever health or brain-bigness benefits it may have, the game certainly looks cute and fun. Siliconera has posted some impressions of the Japanese version, with plenty of screenshots and explanation of the various minigames involved. We suggest you check it out and dramatically increase the size of the area of your brain that holds Big Brain Academy gameplay details!
Big Brain Academy official Japanese site launches
A lot of you folk out there are looking forward to the upcoming Big Brain Academy title set to grace the Wii and, well ... we are too! Upon seeing the site has gone live, we found ourselves poking around the site and checking out various things. Only problem is, we can't understand a single one of these things (aside from the video segments there), what with our complete inability to understand the Japanese language and all. Oh well, we blame our parents ...
Big Brain Academy screens, WiiConnect24 details
It breaks our hearts to see that only a few games on the Wii's roster support Mii integration and WiiConnect24. Nintendo's lack of third-party cooperation might be to blame, but at least the company will be implementing both features with Big Brain Academy for the Wii. Users will be able to import their Miis when creating a student profile, solving the game's reflex puzzles with their customized characters. According to the latest issue of Nintendo Power, WiiConnect24 will allow other people's Miis to wander into your game, equipped with the student profiles of their creators. You will also be able to test your brain against theirs in any of the multiplayer modes. We're going to be pretty depressed if our friends' Miis turn out to be much smarter than us. At least we have our wit! There's always that, right? Big Brain Academy won't be coming out in the US until June 11, so there's still some time to hit the books and get your brain in shape. Jeux-France has several dozen screenshots of the game in action along with some Mii artwork. Check past the post break for a few of those images.
DS Daily: The bandwagon effect
When you're on top, everyone wants a piece of you, and right now, Nintendo's the one in the spotlight -- with not one, but two extremely hot systems. That means one thing: ports and remixes. The problem is, we tend to look with disfavor on the practice of wantonly porting games from console to console, all willy-nilly, without considering that some combinations just don't work. Conversely, there seems to be an assumption that anything that works on the DS could well work on the Wii ... and as much as we love stuff like, say, Phoenix Wright, we're not certain everything and its brother should be ported away from the DS, either (after all, we just stole him from the GBA!). Anything upcoming or announced that you think suffers from a bit too much "me-too?"
A new look at Big Brain Academy
We were able to offer some (lackluster) impressions of Big Brain Academy's move to the Wii, but now we've got fresh new pictures for you to mull over. The simple, clean stye is nice, and we're always pleased to see Miis in action, but we're still hesitant about this one. Some things just seem better for the stylus-powered DS, but hey, Trauma Center worked out okay, so who knows?Check out the screens after the jump and let us know what you think.
GDC 07: Big Brain Academy impressions
GDC's Nintendo booth has been packed over the past few days. With enough begging and pleading, I was able to shove away an elderly woman and work out my brain with the upcoming Wii rendition of Big Brain Academy. The demo on the show floor was multiplayer-only and was decidedly quite simple. You must race against your opponent to solve a series of puzzles: due to the competitive nature of the game, you'll find yourself rushing through the puzzles as quickly as possible. Each puzzle involves doing a simple task, a la Wario Ware, but the game somehow feels much less intuitive than Nintendo's fast-paced microgame collection. Maybe if I were a more careful reader, I would've noticed that I had to repeat a certain image sequence backwards, instead of spending a few minutes feeling like a complete moron. The game feels a lot like Wario Ware in many ways: the game is short, fast-paced, and very simple--almost to a fault. The graphics certainly won't win any awards, and although they get the job done, it's still somewhat disappointing to see such an uninspired look throughout the game. Your Mii can be seen throughout the game, but they serve little more than hovering decapitated avatars. The game's not particularly great, nor is it bad. It'll certainly serve as little more than an innocent way of killing a little bit of time.
Best of the rest: Ross' picks
Lumines Live! (XBLA) On a big screen with surround sound, Q Entertainment's Lumines Live was easily the most-played game in my library (if you stretch the definition of library to digitally distributed titles). Although I railed against how microtransactions were implemented in this title and still think the extent to which they disclosed the dearth of features was misleading, both the Basic and Advanced Pack got more than enough play time, as did the multiplayer. It is the best Xbox Live Arcade title since Geometry Wars.
Brain Training doesn't help old brains after all
For those of us hoping to clutch onto a DS and listen to the sage advice of Brain Age's Dr. Floaty Head (his real name's so hard to remember these days) in order to lessen the rate of our inevitable mental decline, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal's science journal is sure to come as bad news. According to a recent study, constant mental exercise does nothing to slow down the rate of cognitive decline. Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia notes that "there is no convincing empirical evidence that mental activity slows the rate of cognitive decline," a message that stands somewhat opposed to Nintendo's Brain Age campaign. "The research I reviewed is just not consistent with the idea that engaging in mentally stimulating activities as you age prevents or slows cognitive decline." While the rate of mental erosion is labeled as constant by the study, it suggests that the minds that remain sharp are merely dropping from a higher point. The higher you start, the longer it takes you to hit bottom. The mental usefulness of the innocent crossword puzzle also comes under attack assault fire, with Salthouse concluding that there is no evidence that habitual puzzle players experience "a slower rate of age-related decline in reasoning." What's a five-letter word for bummer? Still, the article points out (perhaps obviously so) that the greatest benefit of games like Brain Age is that the constant training improves an adult's ability to perform the given task well. One thing's for sure--we'll soon be glorified experts at saying "Blue!" [Thanks Vlad! Linked article requires membership to access.]
Japanese doctors recommend Brain Training for seniors
Nintendo's line of brain-training games for the DS has found success among a wide range of ages in Japan, but its success with seniors has now been noted even among doctors and hospitals over there.According to the Associated Press, some hospitals have started placing DSes in waiting rooms and wards for patients. An administrator of a "memory loss clinic" in a Kyoto hospital said that doctors there have gone so far as to recommend the purchase of a DS and a game for elderly people to "stimulate their brains regularly at home," even watching patients play as an informal method of diagnosing dementia.Apparently, "Sony rushed out its own version of brain-training software in October but has yet to release sales figures." It's unlikely that the title could match the millions of units sold by its DS-based rival, but regardless of who's ahead, the gaming community should be pleased that 67-year-olds are now eager to "play a little everyday before going to bed," maybe even beating their grown-up children at the game someday.[Thanks, madgamer & samsoon; via Go Nintendo & GameDaily BIZ]
