The disembodied head of Dr. Kawashima, the star of the Brain Age franchise, is set to appear on the Xbox 360 in a new Kinect-enabled brain training title later this year in Japan, according to a recent 1UP report.
News of this broke at Microsoft's pre-TGS briefing, where Namco Bandai revealed New Brain Training You Answer With Your Body, a hands-free joint that is designed to stimulate your mushy organ with the same tricks the Nintendo DS darling Brain Age uses.
Of course, if one's personal processor does indeed need a boost, the game will give him or her the means to do so via training mini-games. And while it's unclear if the mini-games themselves will feature the likeness of Dr. Kawashima, the Tohoku University professor who is generally credited with the creation of Brain Age, he will at least be a big part of the overall experience, according to Bandai Namco.
== TEASER ==What separates Brain Age DS and Brain Training is physical waggle. At the conference, around five mini-games for Brain Training were shown. Each game required some sort of input movement, as opposed to the stylus or button controls featured in Brain Age. This is to be expected, of course, since Kinect's camera doesn't have buttons.
The most interesting of the five mini-games demoed was a kick-to-solve addition and subtraction game called simply Arithmetic Kick. According to 1UP, the game prompts players with a simple math problem and then asks them to solve it. To do so, they'll need to kick a soccer ball with the appropriate answer represented on it into a soccer net. I can feel myself getting smarter already just thinking about it.
A numerical balloon-popping game, a memory challenge game with avatar support, and even a game that had users acting like a clock's hands (pictured above) were shown in addition to the soccer game.
Neither Namco nor Microsoft announced "New Brain Training You Answer With Your Body" for release outside of Japan. But c'mon. This thing has got to come over. The positive impact Brain Age has had with American audiences is still impressive, and the series' sequel-worth sales in the States has to be a factor working in a Brain Training localization's favor as well.
Images via Siliconera.