Brain Challenge vol.2: Stress Management

Brain Challenge 2: Stress Management is the sequel to the mobile phone game Brain Challenge. It introduces Focus minigames, which have a purple motif and focus on the player's attention, and the Stress Test, in which the player is tasked to do tests with a variety of distracting factors and additional conditions.

Notably, this specific version of the game is used as the base for the multi-platform game known as simply "Brain Challenge", and not the original, which only received ports for Symbian (via the N-Gage 2.0 service), BREW, and Windows Mobile.

Revisional Differences#

Over 70 different versions of the game for different phone models are known to have been preserved; 69 of these are for J2ME platforms and one (NEC PRIME series N-01A) is for DoJa. They are as follows:

Modes#

Several low-end versions of the game lack the Stress Test mode. As such, they also lack the game's subtitle in their title screen, which uses a more simplified design, also used by the 128x128 versions. The images below are taken from two separate 128x160 releases.

Nokia 6101	Nokia 5200

Minigames#

Several low-end versions of the game lack 2 minigames in each exercise category; those are marked in gray in the table below. In addition to these, the Nokia S40v1 version lacks the Logic category entirely, and refers to the Countdown, Perception, and Illuminate exercises under the shortened titles of "Count", "Perceive" and "Light".

Music#

• The Nokia S40v1 and S40v2 versions have an extremely simplified soundtrack using the .OTT format, which only has one music channel. There are also very little sound effects.
• Four preserved low-end versions use a simplified version of the title screen theme. Furthermore, several high-end versions use a completely different song altogether.

• Depending on which phone model the player has, the sound effect data may be contained in different audio formats. Most of the preserved versions have a full MIDI soundtrack, though, for several models, a few sound effects are stored in .WAV, .AAC, or .AMR formats. The Samsung OmniaPRO version has a full .WAV soundtrack.

Other#

• Both 320x240 versions (Nokia E71, Nokia C3-00) have the game's subtitle mislabeled as "Stress Manager" in the title screen graphic.

• The Nokia S40v1 version of the game does not lock the player from accessing the Training Room before they can do their first Daily Test.
• Many versions of the game, mostly low-end ones, lack the icons associated with the player's current rank.

Unused Graphics#

The file SPRITES_INTRO contains the graphics used in the game's title screen. Save for several versions of the game, mainly low-end ones, there are also graphics from the title screen of the original Brain Challenge.

The versions that are known to not include these graphics are as follows. In addition, the Samsung (unknown) version lacks the aforementioned file entirely.

Below are the variants of the graphics, ordered by size:

Variant A
{| | | |} These graphics use the BGRA8888 color format. Notably, there are much more leftovers compared to other releases of the game; the additional graphics use a different palette.

Variant B
Most of these graphics use the BGRA8888 color format, though several others, marked in italics, use BGRA4444. The former graphics are the ones uploaded to the site, though the color palette of the latter is also displayed for reference.

BGRA8888	BGRA4444

Variant C1

These graphics use the BGRA8888 color format. The NEC PRIME series N-01A version, which is currently the only preserved DoJa version of the game, is also listed here.

Variant C2
These graphics, while nearly identical to variant C1, have a reduced color amount. All of them, excluding the ones extracted from the Panasonic COLOR LIFE 840P and Samsung Omnia POP (931SC), which are both Japanese phones having the SoftBank carrier, are in the BGRA4444 format; these are the graphics uploaded to the site, though the BGRA8888 palette used by the SoftBank devices is also uploaded for reference.

Others BGRA4444	SoftBank BGRA8888

Hidden Credit#

Most of the game's releases have a hidden credit in their sound effect MIDI files. This credit also appears in the original Brain Challenge.

Copyright © 2006 by Jacob Kaufman

References#