Brain Boost: Beta Wave – NDS – Review

Video games follow trends;
whenever a unique, successful game is released, it’s inevitable that very soon
after copycat titles will be released. Games like Grand Theft Auto, Final
Fantasy, and Nintendogs have all seen a slew of imitators of varying quality
follow in their wakes. Nintendo’s success with Brain Age and Big Brain Academy
virtually guaranteed similar titles to come after them; might I direct your
attention to Exhibit A, Brain Boost: Beta Wave.

Beta Wave’s activities are
centered around improving your concentration. The instruction manual goes on at
length about Dr. Makoto Shichida, a Japanese scientist whose research apparently
formed the basis for the game’s content. Based on this, I was expecting a
scholarly approach to the design of the game, similar to Brain Age’s. Imagine
my surprise when the opening cinematic tells the tale of a robot who loses his
thinking cap, and the quest that his friend (also a robot) undergoes to retrieve
the cap. The quest requires him to best aliens in concentration-based
activities, which form the core of the gameplay.

Structurally, the game is similar to
Big Brain Academy; you train in an activity of your choice, consisting of 20
timed questions, and when you feel confident, you can test yourself. Here,
passing the “challenge” mode unlocks higher difficulties and allows you to see
more of the storyline (not that it’s much of an incentive). Like the two
aforementioned titles, Beta Wave attempts to give your performance a score which
applies directly to the player’s intellect. Unfortunately, it’s even more
nebulous than Big Brain’s “brain weight”– the percentage of questions you got
right in the round is said to be your “concentration improvement”. Therefore, if
you got 18 out of 20 questions right, you showed a concentration improvement of
90%. Aside from having no real meaning whatsoever, this score is not even
tracked to show any actual improvement in your performance-whatever score you
got the last time you attempted a given activity is said to be your current
total concentration improvement.

Even if the scoring
mechanic is faulty, the game could be worthwhile if the activities were varied
and entertaining, right? If only that were the case. A measly five activities
are available: two memory-based matching games, a spot-the-differences type
game, one in which you count moving dots, and addition. Seriously – one of the
activities is just adding single digit numbers and picking the answer from
multiple choice. Brain Age made math fun and engaging by timing you and
tracking your progress over the course of days and weeks; Brain Boost makes math
frustrating and boring by giving you just five seconds to add between five and
twelve digits together, with no statistic tracking whatsoever. The other
activities are almost as bad; all are shallow, repetitive, and possess no
entertainment value whatsoever. Counting the moving dots made me feel like I
was watching a screensaver. The spot-the-differences activity might have been a
decent diversion if I’d played it on my graphing calculator in high school; as
it is, it’s as bad as the rest (also, the graphics of this section are almost
directly stolen from DS puzzler Polarium). The card-matching memory challenges
are at least slightly more visually interesting than the other games, but card
matching is a poor intellectual pursuit for anyone over the age of five.

Brain Boost feels very thrown
together in general. Every aspect of the title, from the graphics to the sound
to the storyline, seems poorly done. If you see Brain Boost: Beta Wave on the
store shelf, pass it on by – your brain will thank you.

Gameplay: 4.3
The “educational” activities
were so dull I longed for the excitement of fourth grade math class.

Graphics: 4.7
These cartoon robots are blah,
and the rest of the game’s graphics are even worse!

Sound: 4.8
Music and sound effects are
sparse, with long stretches of silence. At the very least, they’re not actively
irritating.

Difficulty: Easy/Hard
Some games, like the moving
dots, are fairly easy on all difficulty levels. Others, like the addition, get
impossibly hard almost immediately.

Concept: 4.1
It doesn’t take much creativity
to churn out a title in the vein of whatever’s popular at the moment, especially
one that cuts corners wherever possible.

Overall: 4.4
If you’ve finished Big Brain
Academy and Brain Age and still want a mental workout, save your twenty dollars
for a big book of Sudoku.