Everyone has strengths and weaknesses in Big Brain Academy for Wii’s 15 exercises. If memorisation isn’t your strong suit, put these Face Case tips into practise.

Mix and match
Like a Mr Potato Head doll, the characters that scroll across the screen in Face Case sport interchangeable pieces to their mugs. Some characters are easily identifiable by their hairstyles and skin colours, but the faces have several different types of mouths, eyes and noses. After the faces disappear from sight, you need to choose a face you just saw from three options.

In the Practice section of Big Brain Academy for Wii, you can try Face Case on one of four difficulty levels. For each level, another child is added to the mix. When you finally make it to Expert level, you will need to memorise four faces and then answer a question based on what you saw. With so many different facial features, how can you memorise four faces in a few seconds?

Right in the kisser
Out of all the qualities that make up a unique face in this exercise, the most distinct is the mouth. Most of the time, your final three choices of ‘what character did I just see’ will have a different mouth. It’s a safe bet to say that if you memorise the mouths of the characters, you have all the information you need for the right answer.

The benefits of looking at the mouth over the eyes and nose deal directly with the size of the mouth and the mouth’s location on the face. With the nose, the features are small, and you have to see most of the face in order to find your way to the nose. The eyes are harder to distinguish than the mouth because the differences between some eye styles are slight. The mouths, however, are distinct in every way, and they are located at exactly the bottom of every image. So when your three choices for an answer appear on-screen, you can work your way up from the bottom of the screen, simply looking at the mouth at the bottom part of the image.

How to memorise
Of course, Memorise is the category, and if you can’t remember what you saw in the first place, it doesn’t matter what mouth appears on the face. With each different mouth type, it’s good to come up with names for the mouths – names that you should repeat to yourself while waiting for your three choices to appear. This becomes more important when you see three and four characters on-screen.

You can use words like ‘grin’, ‘open’, ‘sad’ and ‘lips’, for example, to remember the mouth type. When you see a mouth showing teeth, it might be easier to identify this mouth with items or animals, such as ‘saw’, ‘beaver’ and ‘hippo’. Say these words to yourself until you’ve answered the question (whether you say these words out-loud or in-your-head is up to you).

That brain is huge
Memorisation comes very easily to some people, and they probably score in the 400g range to begin with. However, if you don’t have the best short-term memory in the world, these tips should help you get the Big Brain that will be the envy of all your friends – at least in Face Case memorisation.