If you ask someone who owns a DS what games they own, the answer will always usually include at least one game - Brain Training. The game that opened Nintendo games to the mass market, Brain Training revolutionised the industry, as the world discovered that keeping your grey matter in shape can actually be, well, fun.
With Dr Kawashima's Body and Brain Exercises for Kinect (which should really be the other way round), Namco have seen fit to try and add an extra element onto that equation. What if, not only were you exercising your grey matter, but your muscles too? What if you could combine the motion tracking Kinect sensor with the cranium crunching puzzles of Brain Training? The answer, Namco hopes, is a hit.
To begin with, if you're getting a bit put off by the idea of having a strenuous exercise at the same time as chewing over an equation in your head, you shouldn't worry, as Dr Kawashima's Body and Brain Exercises actually has very little to do with the latter. Yes, you'll be making signs with your arms, or holding them out straight, but there's little to make you sweat here - this is no Your Shape, after all.
Each game starts with a nice tutorial that explains what you have to do.
Instead, the game revolves mostly around making you solve puzzles by making gestures with your arms - which is where the body part comes in. Most minigames will ask you to move both arms independently of each other, which apparently uses more brain power than simply pushing buttons on a console. Whether you're pointing to a time on a clock by making the shape of the hands with your arms, or creating a bridge to take traffic from one side of a ravine to another, the game revolves around using the top half of your body, mostly, with little emphasis on your legs. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll be able to play it sitting down, but the game seems fairly forgiving when it comes to room - although it'll often prompt you to stand back, the game doesn't seem to just lose you all that often.
The main chunk of the game is the Brain Fitness test, which, much like the DS games, sets you a series of minigames to complete, before giving you a Brain Age depending on how well you do. On your first go, you'll undoubtedly get an embarrassing score (on our first go, we got 38 - a long shot away from the ideal 20), but as you can only complete the Brain Fitness test once a day, you'll have to keep coming back to the game - hence the "training" aspect of your game. While the game does reward you for coming back to it on a daily basis, in the form of stamps, and achievements, it has to be said that for most households, setting up Kinect for the sake of a ten minute blast on a Brain Training game isn't going to be all that easy.
There's a good mix of games on offer, split into five categories - Math (yeuch - yes, they miss the 's' off), logic, memory, physical and reflex questions, although there's little theming between each of the categories of game. The maths category is undoubtedly the trickiest section, with most games requiring you to stay on your toes when it comes to basic maths. Whether the game's giving you five seconds to solve an equation, and kick the ball emblazoned with the relevant answer into the net, or simply asking you to hold your hands over the two numbers that add up to make ten, the maths is basic enough that it's doable, whilst still being tricky enough to give you a challenge - especially thanks to the cruel time limits.
8 + 7... 15.... 20 - 15... 5! Oh, out of time...
Over in Physical, things aren't quite what you'd expect. Rather than being sweat inducing groan-a-thons, the games here are mostly based around making you use your body in different ways. A game where your one hand controls Pac Man, and your other controls Dig Dug (both classic Namco characters), each on different halves of the screen, as you try to help them avoid the ghosts is one such example - it's flipping tricky trying to make sure your hands are both doing different things, and not basically feeding poor Pac-Man to a ghost, while moving Dig Dug to safety. Another game in this section gives you two punching bags, a red and a blue one, each representing a different number, and counter that steadily increases as time ticks on. When the counter reaches a number that's a multiple of either number, it's up to you to punch the respective beanbag - it's a game that won't test your physical prowess, but certainly makes your brain tingle.
In Logic, you'll find games that are as visual as they are logical, such as the game that asks you to find identical shapes from a selection of eight or so, and point to them with your arms (harder than it sounds). This is also where the aforementioned clock game lives, which gets a lot harder once you unlock the harder difficulties, and it starts to ask you to add or take a certain amount of time away from a pre-determined time. The reflexes section, on the other hand, seems to be made almost entirely out of balloon bursting games - whether it's based on their colour, or in increasing order of the numbers they have on them.
However, it's memory that's home to what's easily the worst of the lot. While this section mostly contains games that are pretty fun to play, including the Pizza game, where a number of pizzas roll down a conveyor belt, and you need to catch only the good pizzas in boxes - the challenge being that the last section of the conveyor belt is covered, so you'll have to remember which pizza comes when.
The problem is, this section is also home to a game that details almost the entirety of our problems with Body and Brain Training - the numbers memory game. What happens in this is you'll be presented with a selection of numbers for a few seconds, which then rotate. It's up to you to hold your hand over each of the numbers in increasing order. The game itself has a few problems, such as the fact that the numbers aren't consecutive, so you're often left going "1... 5... is there anything that comes in betwe-oh.", as the numbers rotate before you've had chance to figure out what order they come in, but the main problem here is the hardware itself.
The mouse-smacking minigame also suffers from Kinectitis, as you'll often hit the wrong mouse accidentally, or for some reason not reach the ones you want.
In a number of the games, the biggest problem is that Kinect just isn't responsive enough for the games included. As a game that measures you brain age by the speed and correctness of your replies, it can often be hard to choose the right answers, yet alone quickly, due to Kinect itself. Whether it's constantly asking you to stand back (despite it still picking you up perfectly), or simply deciding you haven't stretched your arm out quite far enough, Kinect's hand sensors will constantly be wobbling, sometimes enough for you to choose the wrong answer. It's a problem we've experienced in Kinect games before, but in something that requires split second reflexes, it shows up more than most. It's a game that requires the immediacy of the DS touch screen, and often, Kinect can't provide - especially in a game like the one just described. Too often you'll find yourself selecting the wrong answer, because your hand icon's wobbled over it, or because you're trying to go from one side of the screen to the other, and hadn't counted for your hand passing over another icon. It's tricky to explain - but that's why it catches you out when you're playing.
But despite its problems, there's not actually that much wrong with Body and Brain Exercises. The minigames are, for the most part, fairly well put together (if a bit awkward at times), and it even has a four player multiplayer mode to boot. In fact, outside of the problems with Kinect, our main concern is simply one of value for money. With only 20 games included (although there are three difficulty levels of each), the lasting appeal of the game will depend entirely on how long you can play the same set of minigames for, and how fiercely your desire to get the youngest brain age possible burns. The problem with relying on Kinect is that it's often not going to be as easy to set up and play as it is to flick a DS out of your pocket - but if you're looking for a new Kinect game, and fancy something that'll get your brain ticking over, this could be right up your street.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
