Hot Brain

June 27,2007 - Ever since Brain Age took the gaming world by storm one year ago, the brain genre has expanded quite a bit, at least on the DS. Midway has decided to take their chances to bring the genre to the PSP with Hot Brain. Professor Ed Warmer hosts Hot Brain, showing you the ropes and helping raising your brain temperature to become a smarter person. Does Hot Brain manage to feed the fire in your mind or does it manage to extinguish it?

Hot Brain is about as simple as these types of games get. You try to pick the right answers to the problems set in front of you while solving them as quickly as possible for the best possible brain temperature. The fifteen mini-games that are offered across five categories are decently varied between simple and challenging concepts. Shape puzzles dominate the offerings along with a lot of clip art-based puzzles, but there really isn't much of a reward for playing these in the practice mode aside from getting practice outside of the test mode. The problem is that you’re not really rewarded for having a hot brain, as unlocking the higher difficulties is done by just repetitiously replaying the mini-game until you’ve got enough calories to unlock the next difficulty. The closest thing to bonuses is a video of Fred Willard recording some voice overs for the game.

Another of Hot Brain’s problems comes from how the mini-games are set-up, which uses a basic difficulty curve. The repetitious feeling of each playthrough of a mini-game is due to the difficulty curve set-up for each mini-game. The easier problems appear first, usually with very little variety in what you get. You usually see the same problems every single time, especially for the shape-based and word-based mini-games. Tutorials are offered before you start any of these games, though it appears that there’s no way to turn them off. No option exists in the menus, so it gets tedious to have to constantly skip past them when you start a new game.

The test mode in Hot Brain works well, but isn’t able to escape from the lack of compelling fun to keep you playing for more than a couple days. The test mode randomly picks one of the three mini-games for each category, so if you happen to suck at one of them, you’re screwed unless you start over. You start off with easy problems, moving on to medium and hard problems if you move quickly. You’re scored after it’s all over, up to 120 degrees for a perfect score, and you see a graph charting your progress. Unfortunately, the tediousness of it all fails to make you anticipate your next playthrough. There are a couple of multiplayer modes, a co-op mode where you can work with some friends to heat up a brain to a boiling point or racing against a friend to complete a series of mini-games. These offer up some nice fun, but it’s not fun enough to overcome the tediousness of singe-player and make the game worth the $30 price tag.

Hot Brain features a simple look, not unlike most of the “brain” games. Professor Ed Warmer looks nice himself along with the mini-games being mostly of a similar quality to most of the clip-art you’re familiar with. The menus are designed quite strangely. First, every time you complete a round of a mini-game, you’re kicked back out to the main menu, so you’re forced to go back through at least three more menus every time you just want to play mini-games. To make matters worse, the menus you encounter along that route have frequent, small load times that make it a chore to navigate the menus, making you wonder why you couldn’t have the option to stay in the practice menu.

The audio in Hot Brain is filled with rather generic music and the delightful voice of Fred Willard. It’s too bad that Willard’s humor didn’t get the chance to seep into the game, but it’s nice to have a voice explain the mini-games and offer up some trivia along the way. The sound effects of the mini-games are forgettable, as you tend to concentrate more on choosing the right answers than anything else.

Ultimately, it just comes down to Hot Brain not being a compelling title. The game is $10 more than most of these brain games on the DS and the lack of good rewarding content for succeeding in the singe-player modes just makes for a game that’s not really worth the trouble. Everybody that wants this to be a Brain Age for the PSP will be ultimately disappointed, but those desperate enough can just take the cheaper route and rent the game.

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