G-pinions

Picked up my DS Lite yesterday, and played a couple hours of multiplayer Big Brain Academy with Tom last night. Firstly, the game is an absolute riot. While the concept and daily scheduling methods that Brain Age uses to "entertain" are interesting and often enjoyable, BBA is simply more fun minute to minute. It's much more visual, and as a visual person it's nice to be able to play on intuition as well as smarts, instead of rote memorization and mathematics.

We played only on hard, and set the 'score to win' to the maximum amount every time - meaning we had quite a few epic battles. If you answer correctly more quickly than your opponent, you move ahead ten spaces on the road to victory, while a late correct answer will still get them four points (though they only have so long to answer after you have). A wrong answer will move you back a few spaces, so a battle can rage for quite a while if one person isn't consistently getting everything right. We had several sessions where we would top fifty questions, every moment tense, waiting to find out if the other's DS would beep happily with a correct answer or not.

The best is when I would get a question right, then Tom would eventually answer incorrectly, a hilarious moment of crushing victory for me and utter frustration for him. We came up with quite a few marketing slogans for Nintendo to put to good use on a commercial for BBA, including "Fuck that!" and "Bullshit, no goddamn way you answered that faster than me!". Seriously, what would make you want to buy a game more than watching two friends swear heartily at one another while playing it? As for the actual games, they're not really worth describe in detail individually, but they often involve studying the top screen for a few seconds, then going with your best guess by tapping or typing or drawing on the bottom screen. A lot of them involve ridiculously cute animals too - guide an elephant back to his mate with an extra line to complete a path, decide if three stag beetles outweigh two penguins and a seal based on their placement on a set of scales, etc. Even the relatively mundane numbers games quickly get insane on the harder levels.

Finally, as for the DS Lite? Well, Tom asked that I not throw sexual slurs in it's direction like I did the last time I brought it up, so I'll just say that it's an incredibly beautiful system that makes me want to caress it's sleek new edges late into the night. I actually had to turn the brightness down after the first hour last night since I'm fairly sure it was cooking my retinas. I was however, able to hold it casually in one hand in the air as I lay on my back - a shocking comfortably feat that the old DS would stodgily not allow. So yes, it's now the quintessential DS, and if you have the means, indulge as soon as possible (if you can find one).