After Nintendo's success with Brain Age, it seems more and more publishers are becoming concerned with our brains. Hot Brain is Midway's entry into the growing "smart game" market and uses the same basic premise as Brain Age: complete brain-teasing mini-games and sharpen your brain. While the jury may still be out on the last part, Hot Brain is generally good, though the lack of games makes for a short experience.

The only major highlight to Hot Brain's presentation is that Fred Willard voices the doctor who takes you through each floor of the institute where the game is set. Willard does a generally good job, though his talents aren't used as well as they could be. Dialogue is limited mostly to explanation and never feels like it wastes Willard's talents. The short animated intros also hurt the game's pacing; you want to jump between games quickly rather than have to watch a short video of the elevator ride to the next floor of the building.

Visuals during games are big and really clear, so you can never use graphics as an excuse for a wrong answer.

I will readily admit it. As much as I like Brain Age, or at least the premise behind it, I lost interest once a new game came along. Sorry, but the idea of keeping up with a game isn't something I am keen on - otherwise I would be charging though a raid in an MMO. My relationship with Hot Brain was much the same, though I found myself losing interest even faster.

Hot Brain contains a number of brain-bending mini-games that are housed into two structured play types: Practice and Test. Practice lets you go through any of the mini-games and play through them on one of three difficulty levels. The purpose is to get you used to how the mini-games work, so you don't waste time figuring out how things work in Test, where your performance matters. Test Mode is meant as a daily exercise that challenges you with five random games. At the end of the test, you are assigned a brain temperature as a score. The hotter your brain, the better your score.

Hot Brain's only real problem is one that is common for the genre; they can only last so long. Hot Brain is not a game that you will want to spend hours playing, it is more of a "quick game" option for when you only have a few minutes to play, making it ideal as a portable. At the same time, you need to be able to set aside a decent chunk of time of uninterrupted play time, otherwise you are just spinning your wheels. You can only leave the game paused for a short time before it resets.

Two multiplayer modes, Competitive and Cooperative, are available as well. The Cooperative game supports two players while Competitive supports up to four assuming you can find three other people with a copy of the game. Though I wasn't able to try a four player game, I was lucky enough to stumble across a two-player game. I never felt that multiplayer added much, but that could have just been the company.

Despite what some think, Hot Brain, like other brain-training games, doesn't measure how smart you are. While a certain amount of intellect is required to play the games, that level never goes beyond the basic skills you are supposed to pick up in elementary school. Instead, Hot Brain is more of a measure of your mental reflexes, or how quickly it takes you to react to and solve a problem.

With this in mind, Hot Brain has no hard-lined difficulty. Problems ramp up through three difficulty settings as you play, though that isn't something you can easily pinpoint as being "hard." For example, I generally test well in language and spatial relations, while I am abysmal at anything relating to numbers. Because of this, I blew through the hardest language and spatial relations games, but struggled with the number-related sections. It all comes down to your mental strengths.

However, some games do come off as being poorly conceived. In one game, you need to determine the number of people in a yacht and it felt unbalanced when visitors started entering on one side and exiting the other at the same time. This may just be my relationship with numbers talking, but it felt like too much information to process at once.

Mini-games are split into five categories, each meant to target a specific part of your brain. To help test your spatial relations skill, you are shown a set of shapes and asked to determine what figure results from combination. Another, which tests language skills, shows you a picture and you select which word on a list rhymes with it. Math skills, which are far from my strongest suit, are challenged by giving you a problem without an operation and you need to select the correct one. The few games provided in the game are entertaining, though there aren't enough to keep you engaged for all that long.

Regardless of what task mini-games have you perform, all share the same "multiple choice" interface. In the language games, you are given four word choices while logic and math games give you four shapes, numbers or whatever you may need. I can't completely fault the developers because of constraints of the system, but it does take away from the game. You can easily stumble into the answer based on a lucky guess or miss a question by hitting the wrong button.

The interface does work for a good portion of the games, especially the shape games and alphabetizing game, since it limits your choices.

Without the novelty of the microphone and touch screen, Hot Brain isn't as charming as the DS's crop of brain-training games. However, the genre is still new to the PSP, so the field isn't nearly as crowded. Though it may not hold your attention for long, Hot Brain isn't a bad choice for DS-less gamers who may be interested in the whole brain exercise concept.