How About That Thing?

Tiger Electronics was a titan of industry in the 90s. They were most well known for those electronic games that tried, and failed, to compete with the likes of Nintendo’s Gameboy, and Sega’s Game Gear. I myself used to have the Battletoads game Tiger put out, and I remember loving it… For about a week.

But Tiger also put out other games. In particular, the series of electronic games I refer to as “the brain family”. IE, Brain Warp, Brain Shift, and, most notably (to me, anyway), Brain Bash.

Brain Bash was a toy I remembered getting for Christmas one year. I don’t think it was the same Christmas I got that Stretch Armstrong, but it was definitely a Christmas. I don’t remember asking for it, but I don’t remember hating getting it, either.

The game consists exclusively of this board.

The yellow buttons are the player buttons, and the purple buttons are the command buttons. There are five variations of the game, and two of them are pretty straight forward. The game will prompt a player to press the yellow button, then a purple button. IE, “two touch three!”, “Four touch four!”, etc.

Game 1 is the easiest game, with the game starting out asking you to do simple tasks. IE, the previously mentioned “two touch three”, and so on. Eventually, it gets harder, with such prompts as “one touch two two times!”, or “four touch three four times!”. Then it gets even more challenging with such prompts as “four touch four three times, then two!”, or “four touch one four times, then three!”.

Game 2 makes things a little trickier. Instead of announcing numbers, it gives you prompts like “two touch left!” or “four touch across!”. Eventually, it too goes into prompts like “Four touch right four times!”, and so on. This one, I found more challenging at first, but once you get your directions down, it’s easy enough.

Game 3 is where the announcer reads off random math problems. And this is where I remember getting stumped. The announcer never reads off which player is supposed to answer the math problem, so… Am I supposed to hit my button before everyone else does? Do we go clockwise? Counter-clockwise? Nobody has been able to explain it to me in the time I’ve been getting reacquainted with this game.

Game 4 is apparently more of the same as game 3, but with harder math problems.

Game 5… Has got to be the most confusing out of all of them. It reads off random numbers, with the solution to the extra long math problem being one of the four command buttons. IE, “Seven! Minus four! Plus one! Minus two!”. Again, how do you do this? Is there an order you’re supposed to go in? Is it first come, first serve? Much like game 3 and game 4, the directions were never clear.

I tried looking for some sort of on-line guide, silly as that might sound, and so far, as of this writing, I really haven’t come up with anything I didn’t already know. I guess the one or two guides I did find assume you AREN’T brick stupid and can figure out how to play game 3, 4, and 5 on your own. So yeah, no help there.

In fact, trying to find any sort of history surrounding this game has been a bit of a chore. Trying to look this game up on Wikipedia resulted in me being redirected to Brain Warp, which, as I said before, was made by the same company? Doing an Ecosia search brought up some screenshots, but ultimately nothing I didn’t already know.

I think we might have found the electronic toy that time forgot here. The only things I really remember off hand were some attempts at playing it with friends, only to get frustrated with it when game 3 came around. Partly because we didn’t know how we were supposed to answer without getting the “WRONG!” noise, and partly because none of us were especially fond of math.

But the games we WERE able to figure out led to some fun afternoons. True, we’d only play till we got up to game 3, and then switch over to Sega Genesis games or whatever, but it wasn’t without its charm overall. Maybe if the directions were a little clearer, or maybe if we weren’t idiots, we’d have figured things out.

At the same time, though, there’s probably a good reason why we as a society got more mileage out of Bop It.