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Software and Games : Software Categories : Children's Fun & Learning : Characters & Brands : Favourite Characters
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Avanquest Software
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Avanquest Software
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Disney Interactive
Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe is one of a new generation of programs designed for users who enjoy creating art with computer assistance. In addition to the standard-issue graphic tools, this package makes artwork into a game, with moving animations, sound effects, and some very thoughtful design features. While earlier graphics programs often resembled scaled-down versions of adult packages, this one is entirely bent on entertaining children and encouraging sprees of creative electronic drawing. Its kit is full of brightly coloured, genuinely wacky tools, including robots that run around the screen drawing patterns on your page and a sprayer that drops animations into the page. Imagine watching cookies bake onscreen, spreading a line of crawling spiders across a page, or planting roses along the bottom of the screen. Just watching these images mutate to their finalised form is delightful--and they come with top-notch sound effects and a good dollop of humour, too.Another area where older graphics programs broke down was in their reusability factor. Once a child had seen and used all of a package's available images, it was often time to move on to the next contender. However, Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe offers regular updates. Users can download new graphics and animations from the program's Web site, including packages designed particularly for a coming holiday or event.
For users uninterested in using prepackaged art, Disney's Magic Artist Deluxe also offers a full set of tools to allow children to import pictures of themselves and their friends, and then to decorate, alter, and distort them to their heart's content. Whether they want to build static scenes with Disney characters, construct animated tableaus, or digitally bend an existing favourite photograph, this is a graphics program certain to please artistically minded kids and their parents through project after project. --Alyx Dellamonica, Amazon.com
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Avanquest Software
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Avanquest Software
Scooby Doo Phantom Of The Knight
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The Learning Company
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Vivendi Universal
Help your favourite teenage witch recover the Beanie of Ultimate Power in Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Brat Attack, a magical adventure game. It all starts with a package that should have been delivered to someone else. In it is the all-powerful propeller beanie, and Sabrina's cat, Salem, gets locked in a cage when her cousin Amanda decides she simply must have that hat. It's Sabrina's job to recover the cat and the hat from the Other Realm and defeat Amanda and her brat pack.The "Labtop" contains all of Sabrina's spells, and throughout the game, you can store new magical ingredients and spells for later use. Also, make sure to stock up on plenty of energy along the way or you could get sent back to Limbo in the laundry cupboard!
There's five different worlds to explore: Sabrina's house, the Spelleria, Amanda's Arena, Mars, and Sabrina's high school. If your own teenage (or preteen) witch enjoys the television show and has fun solving mysteries, this game should be right up her alley. It's not every day a girl gets to blast her enemies away merely by pointing a finger. With Sabrina at her side, we bet she'll find this problem-solving adventure game truly... spellbinding. --Jill Lightner
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Avanquest Software
Crafted with brilliant colours and the lazy-summer-day pace of the celebrated series, Teletubbies 2: Favourite Games delivers the goods for the toddler set. From the first scene, where the baby-face sun rises across the computer screen, kids will be entranced. Parents will like it too--mostly for the developmental skills the teletubbies teach.The CD-ROM is based around five games, including "Tuning In," "Gymnastic," and "Making Tubby Custard" (which features appropriately silly sound effects). "Hide and Peep" takes the traditional hide and seek game and adds bright red curtains. "Roly Poly" was a particular favourite; when you click on a teletubby it sends Laa-Laa, Tinky Winky, Dipsy, and Po rolling down gorgeous green hills.
A very big pointer triggers the game's actions, and children should be able to use it easily in developing computer skills. These games also help children to learn how to match (from the hiding game) and create ordered sequences (in the case of the custard game). In addition, the game designers have built in considerate additions for the recommended age group, two to four years old. For example, to quit the game parents need to hit the escape key--a good choice for little fingers that might otherwise click an exit icon by mistake. Charming and colourful--like the television show come to life--Teletubbies 2: Favourite Games will please and delight. --Simon Priestly
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Avanquest Software
Can We Fix It?. Of course we can, and with this BBC software package little builders will be better equipped than ever!. Featuring the chirpy Bob and his mechanical multitude of talented friends, this fun package is a mixture of educational encouragement and pure out-and-out fun.Once loaded, you are invited to move the cursor around Wendy's office to select your tasks: hover over the phone, and it rings with a plumbing job; go near the fax, and a job comes in for Roley. Keep moving around, and you will find enough jobs to keep little fingers and minds busy for hours.
In "Hedgehog Rescue", the aim is firstly to help Lofty the Crane build a tunnel to save the scared hedgehogs from crossing the road. Children must match pipe shapes to tunnel shapes, and construct the route. The next, more difficult game, involves Wendy herding the hedgehogs into the tunnel--easier than it sounds, since one particularly persistent hedgehog seems unwilling to go.
In "Travis' Race Day", choose between Scoop or Dizzy to a head-to-head around an obstacle-strewn track. Guide your challenger by mouse or arrow keys--again, not as easy as it sounds, and a great developmental aid for hand-to-eye co-ordination.
"Can We Build It?" involves knocking down an unsafe bridge, then using colour recognition to match the bricks to rebuild it. Roley needs a hand with unruly tarmac in "Bubble Trouble", when you must guide him over the bubbles to even out the road. And in "Scary Spud", you must move Spud around the screen to scare off the crows. But the crowning glory is "Wendy's Birthday", where guests first decorate her cake then join in the fun line dancing. Also included on each game is "Where's Pilchard?", a hide-and-seek game for the shy, blue cat.
Accompanied throughout by Neil Morrisey's narration and the superb music from the TV show, (also now a CD single), this package builds on many elementary educational skills to make little builders into fully fledged Bobs. And while it is not that quick to load (missing plug-ins are provided, but it may take some time) it is well worth the wait.
Testers of around two years old found this package fun and evocative of their favourite TV character, though they did require constant supervision and most of the games were beyond mastering. This is a superb educational aid and lots of fun. (Suitable for ages 2 to 6).--Lucie Naylor
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BBC Multimedia
Hey, Hey, are you ready to Play to the Music with the Tweenies? An amazing 50 per cent of pre-school children in the UK watch the loveable characters on TV, and this new package picks out the element they love the best: singing action songs. When the Tweenie clock stops on "Dance Time", Bella (as usual!) takes the lead, and youngsters can either help Fizz copy Bella's moves, or they can boogie along, copying the steps on the dance mat (included, with a microphone). In the "Music Garden", you must help Judy and Jake grow a song bush, whereas in the "Tunearoonie Maze" your task is to guide the Tweenies around a maze and collect musical notes. But beware of the dinosaurs, or you could be singing the blues sooner than you think. Meet the "Tweenie Band", find out what instruments they like by trial and error and then sing along with the tunes they play. These somewhat prescriptive activities are fantastic for the target age group: they improve colour recognition, musical awareness and singing ability, basic mouse and PC skills, as well as artistic awareness, concentration, hand-to-eye coordination and finer motor skills. But the real fun comes in the more open activities, where children can plug in the microphone and sing along with the Tweenies. The special video clips included are taken from the live, sell-out shows of early 2001, TV programmes and the Tweenies' unforgettable appearance on Top of the Pops. Karaoke wannabes can even record their voice and become a real Tweenie pop star themselves. If this all sounds a bit raucous, concentrate on the educational value: BBC production values mean this is fun, entertaining and wonderfully designed, but it also stays true to the underlying developmental slant of the TV show. Following the success of the Tweenies: Ready to Play (which sold around 330,000 copies and topped the UK software retail charts for 35 out of 54 weeks after launch) this package is simply fantastic, but if you still need convincing, just remember: millions of three-year-olds can't be wrong! --Lucie Naylor
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Avanquest Software
When you start The Lion King II: Simba's Pride you enter a very atmospheric animated jungle. Paddle Bash and Conga Longa are easy games to pick up but they are difficult to master.In Paddle Bash you grab a paddle and you get yourself ready to send balls flying as you try to knock down as many bricks as you can. As you would expect from Disney, there are plenty of fun, colourful special effects as bricks are successfully broken up. Smart keyboard skills are required as you try to angle your shots and send balls bouncing in every direction. And as you score points, you help Timon or Pumbaa move closer to a tasty bug treat. There are clear printed instructions with each game and your mouse is represented on the screen as a lion paw-print. If you want to break yourself slowly into the game, you can start at the kitten or cub level.
The second game, Conga Longa invites you to keep the jungle beat as you join a swinging conga-line of cartoon animals. The aim is to move your cub around and gather up other animals into a conga line. As you dance by an animal, it hops into your line. But if you break your line, you lose your dancing animals. With the jungle music pumping away in the background, this is a tough game to get to grips with. But if your cub dances over a red flower, you get bonus points and there are specific bonus animals you have to collect. It's an original game but it requires a lot of practice to get your conga swinging properly! --Justin Hunt
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Avanquest Software
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FastTrak
Raymond Briggs' modern children's classic, The Snowman, is now a familiar seasonal companion to a whole generation, and this interactive CD-ROM is another magical way of enjoying the wonderful story.I remember that winter, because it brought the heaviest snow that I had ever seen. The snow had fallen, steadily all night long, and in the morning I awoke in a room filled with light and silence. The world seemed to be held in a dream-like stillness. It was a magical day, and it was on that day I made the Snowman.
Once loaded, the haunting, evocative soundtrack strikes up, and you are immediately presented with the now-familiar picture of the Snowman. Move the mouse once, and five pictures, which form the menu, appear.
The rest is up to your little helper! They can read the book, page by page, and if the story is already familiar to them, the real fun in this activity is to be found in the games along the way. Click on the Snowman icon on the intermittent pages on which he appears, and you will be presented with an appropriate game. When James is getting up to get dressed on the morning of the snowfall, you can play the point, drag and drop game that will not only encourage basic mouse skills, but will also wrap James in a variety of outfits. When the now animated Snowman climbs aboard the motorbike, the associated game involves opening and closing gates and leading him to James. This more sophisticated gameplay encourages hand-to-eye co-ordination, planning and cause-and-effect, on top of the PC skills.
Tidying up is a skill every parent wants to encourage, even in a virtual world, and when the Snowman goes inside, items throughout James's house are mixed up for little fingers to put back in their rightful place. Not only does this encourage cleanliness, but it also refines mouse skills and encourages problem solving.
Colour recognition comes into play when James and the Snowman are flying, and you have to click on the Snowman with the Yellow, Purple, Red, Blue and Green hat in turn. As the Snowman learns to dance, youngsters are encouraged to learn patterns as they get their snowmen to mimic James's actions.
But the real magic of this package is in the film, available now for children whenever they want to watch. Though the screen size is small and the transfer slightly pixellated and jerky, it loses none of the magic you felt when you first watched it on TV. Beautiful, exciting, engaging and haunting, the combination of pictures and music without any words, is a unique experience youngsters will just adore.
Incredibly easy to load, (just put it in the CD-ROM drive and the rest is done for you), this program doesn't leave the tell-tale files all over your desktop that eventually fill up your hard drive. This advantage, however, means the program is played straight from the disc drive, and it is a little pixellated in places. And when selecting tasks and activities via the main menu, users may find the audio instructions blur a little if this is done quickly and erratically, as youngsters are prone to do.
That said, this is undoubtedly one of the nicest pieces of children's software on the market. Containing everything a Christmas Classic should--a great story, lovely pictures, haunting music and loads and loads of fun and games, it should be in every stocking. --Lucie Naylor
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Avanquest Software
Zoombinis Maths Journey features uncommonly fun reasoning games that require serious problem solving and maths work. This CD-ROM employs basic fundamentals of mathematical thinking while keeping children thoroughly entertained throughout.Not too long ago, Zoombinis enjoyed the good life. Though they all looked slightly different--different eyes, noses, hair, feet--such differences meant nothing to the Zoombinis. And so they lived happily on Zoombini Isle, making small, useful products, which were prized the world over.
So begins this unsuspectingly addictive CD-ROM, yet the perils that face this cheerful society are not as fearsome as the amount of time you'll potentially spend on this pursuit. Beware the chubby, chattering Zoombinis if you don't want to get hooked to your computer for at least 90 minutes a session.Adored by educators and parents alike, Zoombinis Maths Journey challenges children to employ such basic fundamentals of mathematical thinking as organising information, reasoning of evidence, finding and making patterns, and systematic testing of hypotheses. The journey follows four puzzle-filled trails, each exploring related mathematical ideas. The fundamental data and variables for all this work are the variations in the Zoombinis' features. Their "feet", for example, can be shoes, skates, whirligigs, or coiled springs (the sound effects for these items are particularly great), while their "eyes" may be heavily lidded, enhanced by eyeglasses, blocked by dark shades, or limited to just a single eyeball. Sorting and arranging these variables in order to solve puzzles requires concentrated effort from the players and the game rewards them well with inventive scenarios that evolve in fabulously curious ways as skills are gained. This may not sound like much, but when Arno the Pizza-Eating Tree Troll, who has been yammering for the perfectly topped pizza his entire lifetime, suddenly demands a perfectly topped ice cream sundae, too, it is a staggering, giddy surprise.
The product is full of so many little joys, it's hard to demand improvements. Still, it'd be a great thing if version 2 would feature something other than the monotonous, ping-ping-ping soundtrack that's featured here. But that's minor. In the end, the creators' promise that this CD-ROM will "encourage kids to develop a lifetime habit of associating fun with learning" is spot on. (Ages 9 and up) --Jean Lenihan, Amazon.com
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Avanquest Software
Hey, hey, are you ready to play? It's time to come and play with the Tweenies software. Jake, Milo, Bella and Fizz are all waiting to improve your little one's writing, art, reading and listening skills, as well as develop early gaming talents.Tick, Tock, Tweenie Clock, Where Will It Stop?
Immerse your youngster in the colourful and familiar Tweenies world, brilliantly represented in sound and graphics on your PC. Everyone will love "Messy Time", with the three different print and play games, as well as instructions on how to make finger puppets, masks, badges and spinners. Then there's "Doodles Mail"--write to the Tweenies via Doodles, receive a reply, and see little faces light up. Watch favourite characters during "Telly Time", and join in the action songs in "Song Time". "News Time" will test pre-school general knowledge and Tweenies trivia, while "Playtime" encourages early gaming skills with "Catch", "Flying Rocket" (an arcade-style game) and "Snap". Then, if you're sitting comfortably, there's the old faithful, "Story Time".Clear, colourful and easy to use, the Tweenies software will appeal greatly to children from the age of three, but there's plenty to keep the five- and six-year-olds happy as well. Language development, numeracy, creativity, elementary computer skills and good old-fashioned fun are all encouraged, and the whole package is designed to support Key Stage 1 in English, Art, Maths and Information Technology. Whether you select your own activities, or let the Tweenie Clock pick at random, child appeal is absolutely guaranteed. Though simple in principle, all the games and learning activities have the repetitive quality toddlers love and thrive on. This is every bit as good as the TV show with one major advantage--it lasts much longer. --Lucie Naylor
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Avanquest Software
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Avanquest Software
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Avanquest Software
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Avanquest Software
What's the story in Balamory? Invite your kids to join Miss Hooly, Pocket & Sweet, PC Plum, Archie, Spencer and Edie Mcredie in virtual Balamory and they will learn as they play. Based on the popular BBC TV children's programme, the BBC Balamory CD-ROM opens with the colourful introductory song viewers know so well. Children are then presented with a variety of games to test basic pre-school and early years skills.For younger children (3-4 years) the favourite will no doubt be Josie Jump's Hide and Seek game, where they must find Josie in a field of people, then click on her to make her jump. Equally rewarding for the smallest players is Spencer's Colour Challenge, where youngsters use basic mouse skills and number recognition to match colours with areas of the drawing--a kind of virtual colour by numbers.
All players will love Edie's Delivery Dilemma, which involves Pac-Man-like gameplay as youngsters work against the clock, using the arrow keys to direct Edie's bus around the town and picking up fruit dropped by the delivery van so that Pocket & Sweet can sell it in their shop. PC Plum Investigates asks children to sort through the evidence that is all mixed up on the policeman's desk, so he can sort out his cases--tasks such as "click on the things that are the same colour as the sea" make this game accessible to most players.
Slightly older children, (4-6 years) might like to try Archie's Word Wonder, where they must fill in the missing letters on words so that Archie's Word Machine can produce words for Miss Hooly's stories. The only criticism here is that words are sounded out by name only, and not phonetically, but otherwise this is a fun, testing game. Children of school age will also enjoy Pocket & Sweet's Shopping Spree--a fun shopping game that involves helping Penny and Susie put together all their orders, then adding up the cost at the end. If players tire at any point, they can take a break with one of six Miss Hooly stories.
The production quality is superb: colours are bright and images crisp and the clips from the show run perfectly. Each game is introduced and narrated by the corresponding character from the show, with original voiceovers, and the games are fun, educational and pitched perfectly at the target age-range. There are three difficulty levels for each task, to avoid frustration and aid development. Help is on offer on every screen, and children as young as three or four years old, who possess basic mouse skills, will be able to play the easier games unaided, and the others with assistance. Instructions are read out and printed on-screen, so children can follow as they listen, thus developing valuable reading skills. Great thought has obviously gone into matching characters with tasks, and the variety of games played and skills tested makes this a fantastic all-round package. --Lucie Naylor
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Avanquest Software
