Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

The human brain, the central processing unit of human beings, is an amazing organ.  A human brain weighs a little less than a pound at birth and grows to about three pounds as an adult.  The brain controls how we move, stores all of our memories, and processes all the information we gather through our senses.  However, the brain degenerates as we get older.

Hot Brain attempts to raise the temperature of your brain by presenting a series of puzzles.  The reasoning behind this is that the heat in your brain is caused by energy generated by the blood flowing in your brain.  The more blood flowing through your brain, the hotter your brain apparently gets.  The more you use your brain, the more blood flows through your brain, the hotter your brain gets.

A game like Hot Brain really doesn’t need to have spectacular graphics to be a great game.  Most of the graphics are just simple drawings and diagrams for memory games, while others are just numbers and letters.  They do serve their purpose, but a few games have slightly more elaborate graphics.  The game Cruise Ship has people running on and off a ship.  Not only that, but some of the people actually dive off the ship.  This little difference makes the game more challenging than the house puzzle in Brain Age.  Then again, you aren’t going to be playing either game for the graphics.

The game is represented by the Hot Brain Institute with five different levels, one for each of the different kinds of challenges.  The levels are colorful, with yellow, purple, green, and other bright colors representing each level.  Also, Dr. Ed Warmer is a CGI creation that is actually animated pretty well, even if most of the animations are repeated each time.

Dr. Ed Warmer is voiced by Fred Willard.  At first I thought that it was an odd choice, especially after he is well known more for his parts in late-night comedy sketches lately.  His voice doesn’t sound like you’d expect from a professor or doctor either.  Yet when you see how well his voice interacts with Dr. Warmer’s on-screen persona, it works very well.

A few beeps, buzzes, and dings are the highlight of Hot Brain.  If you are right, you get a ding.  If you are wrong, you get a buzz.  Beeps indicate when you are running out of time for the specific exercise.  There isn’t much more to it than that.  Background music while you are concentrating could definitely get annoying, a little more music could be nice.  However, the beeps indicating time is running out really do raise the tension to make you attempt to go faster.

The controls in Hot Brain are very simple.  The mini-games only use the face buttons.  The menus use the D-pad and then X to select and Circle to go back.  The only thing that is bad about the controls is how the fact buttons are displayed on the screen.  Because the options are sometimes placed horizontally or vertically, the X and Triangle buttons can be confusing for horizontal puzzles, and the Square and Circle can be confusing for the vertical puzzles.  On a few occasions I hit the wrong button because of this.

Hot Brain is comprised of five different categories: Logic, Memory, Math, Language, and Concentration.  Each of these categories has three tests with three difficulty levels for each test.  You can complete a full test that includes one test from each category.  In each test, if you do better the game increases the difficulty level, but if you start to do poorly it will lower the difficulty level.  Once you complete all five tests you’ll get your brain temperature from the average of all five tests.  A graph that saves your brain temperature is available for you to see your progress as you test yourself.

You are also able to practice the different tests individually.  At first only the Easy difficulty is available for you.  As you practice each individual test, you can earn enough degrees to unlock the Medium and Hard levels.  The only problem with this is that the easy levels can be fairly easy when you start out and it can be easy to get bored from them.  There also isn’t much of an incentive to practice other than to get the higher difficulty levels.  Some of the tests are easier and more fun than others, so trying to unlock everything can be tedious.

One of the issues with Hot Brain is that it every test is some kind of multiple choice.  While some of the tests have one answer, the other tests may require a sequence of buttons.  Still, there is a possibility of getting an answer right, even without knowing the right answer.  This isn’t like Brain Age where you really need to know the correct answer.  Sometimes using estimation can be good enough.

All of the categories of Hot Brain have very different tests.  This is good as the tests in Hot Brain attempt to stimulate different parts of the brain.  However some of the tests within a category are very similar to each other, making the game have a little less variety than what there actually could be.

The loading in Hot Brain can be annoying.  It's not that the load times are long, it's just that they can be very frequent and happen at inopportune times.  Sometimes you can be in the middle of a test and it will start to load up different information.  During this pause you can sometimes lose some of the momentum you had if you were doing well.

One other thing about Hot Brain that bothers me is that it doesn’t tell you how it calculates the temperature of the brain.  Once you finish a test, it tells you the difficulty of the test and which test you played, the number of questions you answered and the number of questions you answered correctly, and the average number of seconds it took to answer a question.  However, you don’t really have any way of knowing how it determines the brain temperature and what you need to do to improve your score.

It will take a while to complete all of the difficulty levels for all of the individual tests in the Practice mode.  It seems like you need to complete each test at least three times to unlock the next difficulty level, but more attempts may be necessary.  There doesn’t really seem to be much incentive to unlock more levels.

Two multiplayer modes are available in Hot Brain for up to four players.  The cooperative game is called the Think Tank.  In this game each player works together to increase the 3D on-screen brain to a set temperature.  Correct answers increase the temperature, while incorrect answers decrease the temperature.  Brain Race is a competitive game where everyone competes at the same time to reach a red hot level.  The first one to get there wins.  While these modes can be a nice distraction, it won’t be something that you’ll gather around to do multiple times.  Hot Brain doesn’t support sharing either, so each person needs a copy of the game to play these multiplayer modes.  The ability to share a demo of the game would have helped the game.

There is an addicting quality to Hot Brain to try to do better, in a similar way to Brain Age.  However, Hot Brain also suffered in the same way that Brain Age did, in that I lost interest in it.  While I could see myself doing the test just to see how much better I’m doing, I don’t see myself doing the practice sessions long term.  While Hot Brain is the only offering like this for the PSP, you’d be better off getting a Nintendo DS with Brain Age or Big Brain Academy.  With Brain Age 2 coming out soon, there will be more competition in this kind of game.  Midway made a valiant attempt at bringing a fun experience to the PSP, but there are some elements still missing from the equation.

Gaming Trend Score

66

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 60
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 66
5. Value/Replay: 58
6. OVERALL:66