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The smash hit Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day has inspired a slew of pretenders and clones. Even Nintendo cashed in on the game's success with Big Brain Academy installments for the Nintendo DS and Wii. With the flood of educational wannabes competing for the casual game market, we're more than ready for a tongue-in-cheek affair that skewers the good-for-you trend. Hot Brain isn't that game. It's another half-baked reworking of the timed-quiz premise, with a tantalizing but all too fleeting dash of humor sprinkled on top.

Feel the Burn

Where other games measured a brain's age or weight, Hot Brain purports to cram a thermometer into the player's gray matter and measure just how much heat is happening upstairs. Sadly, the game takes this fairly ridiculous premise fairly seriously. Measurements of cranial temperature are overseen by a crackpot scientist Professor Ed Warmer. Warmer presides over The Hot Brain institute – a haunted looking museum that's crammed with scientific equipment and completely understaffed. The institute’s work isn't all that rigorous though. It's hardly a one-man job. Ed Warmer's methods are nearly identical to every other video game intelligence test out there. Timed quizzes in five categories grill player skills. The results are then tabulated into an overall brain temperature. Players can practice each test individually or play with friends, either cooperatively or competitively.

Cool Runnings

Hot Brain's tests are mostly multiple choice tests. Without the point and click selection or the touch-screen writing made possible by the Wii or the Nintendo DS many of the Hot Brain's quizzes seem to blend together. Players are often given four choices and need only press the corresponding button to move on. It doesn't help that most of these tests are rehashes of questions already introduced in older games. There are sound games that ask players to memorize the sequence of a tune, tasks that require combining objects to make a certain shape, and tons of straight-up math questions. Still, these mini-games can be challenging. At their highest difficulty, they feel slightly tougher or, at the very least, more complex than the questions posed by Dr. Kawashima and Professor Lobe.

What Happen?

Hot Brain's biggest disappointment is the way it squanders an opportunity to treat with IQ-themed mini-game genre with Wario Ware-style irreverence. Professor Ed Warmer is voiced by comedian Fred Willard best known for his turn in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and his work with spoof-meister Christopher Guest in movies like A Might Wind and Best in Show. Willard is a very funny man, but his humor can't break loose of the game's play-it-safe attitude. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to make Hot Brain the same serious affair as the games it was ripping off. Folks with more fire in their game-making noggins would have ditched this already-played out approach and aimed to make Hot Brain more fun.

Article by: Gus Mastrapa
Video Produced by: Joel Rubin