Body and Brain Connection Kinect-ing Feb. 8

The Xbox 360 Kinect camera peripheral can see how players are using their bodies, but Namco Bandai wants to use it to see how players are using their minds. The publisher has announced a February 8 North American release date for Body and Brain Connection, with a February 11 debut in Europe, where the game will be called Dr. Kawashima's Body and Brain Exercises.

Body and Brain Connection includes 20 minigames designed to test players' math skills, memory, reflexes, and other capabilities. For example, one such game has the player point out matching pairs from a field of shapes, while another asks players to use their arms to sort toy cars on the move, rerouting them onto color-coded tracks.

While the game isn't part of Nintendo's Brain Age franchise (despite the association with the bespectacled face of that brand, Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima), it will still assign players a brain age and allow them to track their progress. The game also includes a multiplayer mode allowing up to four players to compete for the lowest brain age or best performance on a specific minigame.