The colossal success of Big Brain Academy and the Brain Training games on the Nintendo DS handheld system has done a fair share of good for Nintendo's bottom line over the past year or two. It's thus understandable that these are franchises Nintendo would look to bring to the Wii console, and Brain Brain Academy: Wii Degree is the first attempt to do so.

Tempting you in with a £19.99 price tag, the concept, look and feel here is very much in tune with its handheld brother. Using your Wiimote as a pointer, you take on a small (and it really does feel small) selection of brain-testing puzzles in either single or multi-player mode.

In single-player mode, you get a winding opening lecture about your brain and how clever you aren't, before you eventually get to the point where you set up your player and head off for a test. Now this test features the same mini-games no matter how many times you do it, and while it splits into analyse, memorise, identify, compute and visualise, you'll soon know the three sub-games within each category like they were old friends.

That's not to say they aren't engaging, and some of the them really do tax the grey matter as much as you'd hope. It's just that the DS version felt better, more intuitive and more varied. Perhaps the touch-screen interface works better for this kind of thing, because playing games of odd one out, laying track for a train, bursting balloons in numerical order and working out what a picture is as it slowly reveals, doesn't fully measure up.

The overall goal of the game is to increase the weight of your (virtual) brain. You do this by getting more puzzlers correct and answering them quickly. But familiarity is likely to achieve this, rather than raw brain power alone. Still, in the early stages at least, it is good fun, if, er, not particularly clever.

Multi-player mode, as you'd hope, is slightly better but again it feels a little undercooked. There are a few different ways to play and the mind sprint mode was our favourite, given that it involves attempting to be the first to complete a series of problems. But again, the game tops out surprisingly quickly and you're likely to head back to the handheld version.

The budget price tag, you can't help concluding, is there for a reason. While it's great to pick up a new release for less than £20, it's a fair reflection of how much value you'll get from your purchase.

Let's hope that when, inevitably, the superior Brain Training games get to the Wii, a bit more thought and love will have been put into them. As it stands, this is a disappointing if still quite engaging take on a franchise that's already proven to have far more potential.

Decent short-term fun, but Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree is nonetheless limited entertainment. Go for the DS equivalent instead.