Sure, I may be decent at putting these words together to form a coherent sentence, but when it comes to figuring out what animal makes the honking sound and in what order he does it compared to the moo and the monkey yelp, I sink faster than the Nintendo Gamecube's online plan. Nintendo wants me to improve, and that's why they've released the polar opposite of Brain Training, a game merely a few months old, this one titled Big Brain Academy.

Before I start lecturing you on Big Brain and what it can do for you, we have a short survey for you to fill out. Don't worry, it's quick, painless, and completely tongue-in-cheek. Enjoy!

1) Have you played Brain Training?
2) a. Did you enjoy it? Y (yes) or N (no) 2) b. If you answered yes, consider if you felt you improved your brain's thought process or not. If you feel you did, please disregard this game. If you did not, please move on. 3) a. If you answered no, is it because you found the game to be far too serious?

If you made it to question three part a and you answered yes then please continue with the review.

Big Brain Academy is to Brain Training what Metal Gear Solid is to Splinter Cell. If you don't understand that analogy then perhaps you do need this game after all. Or perhaps you just don't play enough video games. Regardless, Big Brain is as far from Brain Training as you could get whilst still sticking within the educational genre. They both aim to improve your brain but take totally different approaches. Okay, I should rephrase that. Brain Training has an approach - Big Brain does not.

Big Brain has no daily calendar to track your progress, no charts and graphs measuring your brain's growth, and it throws out all of the mathematical analysis done to determine your true brain age. It simply goes through five categories, giving you an exercise in each, and then determines your brain's weight in grams (shouldn't that be mass?) for each category and adds them together to determine your brain's ultimate weight (which is also displayed as a traditional letter grade.) This is all there is to it - there are no mini-exercises, nothing to show your real progress... you just retake the tests whenever you'd like to try and improve your score. You can practice any of the 15 tests whenever you'd like, which I'll go over now... if I have to.

The first category is part of the "Think" theme. These games use cute little pictures of animals and ask you to determine which one weighs the most, or have you draw a line on a preset path to lead one animal to another. The final game displays arrows on the top screen that shows you how an animal on the lower screen will move along a small grid, and the objective is to click on the square he'll end up in. They sound easy and for the most part are, but obviously pick up in challenge as you make it further into them.

The Memorize league contains memory-based questions that involve numbers or pictures flashing on the screen quickly, as you attempt to remember them, or listening to an animal call and selecting the creature that produced it. The visual-themed questions, also known as Identify, are probably some of my favourites of the bunch: Shadow Shift has you look at moving shadows and selecting from a group of images below that match up, while Get in Shape shows a silhouette of an object and challenges you to reproduce it with basic geometric shapes on the bottom screen. The final game in this league is a simple match game where you select the two similar objects in a large group of items.

The Compute league has an interesting test where two different sets of currency are shown and your objective is to determine which one has the greater amount of money. A true test for those that imported the game from another country! Add Agency displays a number of figures on the top screen and then three or four sets of figures below, each with a smaller amount, with the goal being to pick the two sets that would equal the amount on top. The final challenge is a simple written math test that is almost fun. Almost.

The last set, Analysis, has another good test: Cube Game. Pun intended? I think so! Your simple task is to count the amount of cubes on screen, but this gets difficult when several cubes begin stacking up and blocking each other. Math and simple logic are large parts of this one. My last favourite is Missing Link, only because it involves drawing and I'm a sketch artist at heart. By drawing a mean connecting the dots in the simplest form you can imagine, but it is quite a bit of fun and somehow manages to get really hard. The final game, called Animal Lines, involves more pictures of animals (Dr. Kawashima would never approve of all these animals, I assure you) and has you tracing through a series of animals on the bottom to make the same pattern. Yeah, I don't get it either.

Then there's a multiplayer mode for eight friends (unlike Brain Training, Big Brain knows you don't have 16 friends who will be willing to play this with you!) that allows you and your friends to have a contest to see who has the heavier brain. A bragging right any of your friends will kill for, I'm sure! Big Brain is a simple bit of fun that is nowhere near as serious as its counterpart, but therefore renders itself inferior as well. The lack of any graphs or progress measurement is a huge downfall and though I bashed Brain Training for doing the exact opposite, Big Brain giving you all the exercises right in the beginning is a problem. Perhaps it wouldn't be if there was more to the game, like there is with Brain Training, but there just isn't. You go in, practice the tests, take the brain weight exam, and that's it.

If I've come off as very sarcastic in this review, it's simply because, compared to Brain Training, the game is mostly boring and I was amusing myself at its expense to keep myself sane. Despite some of the tests being moderately fun, they're nothing special that you can't find online for free. If you're really looking to improve your brainpower then you should definitely go with Brain Training, unless you're looking for a game suitable for a youngster - in which case Big Brain Academy is indeed the better option. If you can actually get your child to sit down and play it more than once then you have absolutely no need for this game, or Brain Training, because you are a genius! Speaking of genius, you can try and play both, with the ultimate goal of becoming the ultimate genius, but I think you're more likely to go insane first. In the end, the two games are aimed at totally different brains, if you will, and it's really up to you to decide how seriously you want to take your brain training. Decide wisely - your mind is on the line!

Reviewed by Christopher Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).