Brain Age received the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival award for gaming innovation.
On August 21st, the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival awarded its two Edge awards (named after event sponsor Edge magazine) for innovation and the EIEF 2006 Edge Mobile People’s Choice Award. Although Dirty Sanchez Party Games, a collection of WarioWare inspired mini-games, won the mobile game award, the winner of the EIEF06 Edge Award was Nintendo’s Brain Training (renamed Brain Age in the U.S.A). Brain Age competition included Indigo Prophecy, Amped 3, Dragon Quest VIII, Electroplankton, Guitar Hero, Killer 7, and Ouendan. The EIEF committee nominated Brain Age for being “As effective a demonstration of Nintendo’s game design experience as any Mario or Zelda classic, Brain Training may look like the worst idea for a fun five minutes ever – mental arithmetic, Dickens readings and memory tests – but it works as a case study in why good game mechanics are so compelling, whatever the framework they serve.”
Accepting the award for Nintendo was Nintendo UK general manager David Yarnton, whose speech included, “In the past, people said that Nintendo was staid and conservative, but we’ve shown that we’re heading in a different direction from others in the industry with fresh and original ideas. Only Nintendo could make arithmetic fun.”
The Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival is held by a team comprised of publishers, developers, journalists, The Independent Games Developers Association, and the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association. Most of the members and organizations associated with the event are UK-based, and the event takes place for two days in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Published: Aug 24, 2006 02:11 am