Little People Discovery Airport from Fisher-Price and Knowledge Adventure and Butt-Ugly Martians: Martian Boot Camp from Knowledge Adventure
Little People Discovery Airport from Fisher-Price and Knowledge Adventure
Kids ages 2 to 4 will get some early learning experience with Little People Discovery Airport, a new educational software title from Fisher-Price and Knowledge Adventure. The software offers great graphics, nice music and neat sound effects to help keep any kid busy at the computer for hours of fun and a little learning at a little local airport (puns intended).
After a quick installation from a single CD, with a video introducing the little people gang, kids are on their way to the Little People Discovery Airport to learn some fun facts and have some fun airport activities. This software is based on the popular Fisher-Price Little People toy line featuring those famous kid characters: Eddie, Sarah Lynn, Maggie, Sonya Lee, Michael and Pilot Paula. After signing in, kids have access to all activities from the main menu. They'll learn about weather as they fly through a cloud maze with Maggie, learn about shapes and colors sorting suitcases with Sarah Lynn, they'll assemble and paint new airplanes with Michael, learn about math with pets and Sonya Lee, visit Eddie in the control tower for some plane fun (pun intended) and have more fun with printable activities like "connect the numbers" and coloring pages. Also, several hot spots on the screen will react to a mouse click or two.
All the activities require computer mouse skills, which may be difficult for two-year-old toddlers, and some three-year-old kids. So, parents will have to help those kids untrained in the mouse. In fact, the Little People software may encourage mouse skills and then parents will just stand back and watch as their little computer genius tackles the next educational title. My daughter Sarah, who is now 11-years-old, learned the mouse at the young age of 2 ½, which allowed her access to Davidson's Reading Blaster Jr. (see photo below). Shortly thereafter, she amazingly learned to read, which I attribute to Reading Blaster Jr. However, my wife said Sarah would have read early without the software. I disagree.
Little People Discovery Airport sells for $17.99 and will run on any multimedia PC, Pentium 233 MHz or faster, 64 MB RAM with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP and a 16x CD-ROM drive. It also runs on a Power Mac G3 233 MHz or faster with 64 MB RAM and a 24x CD-ROM drive.
Butt-Ugly Martians: Martian Boot Camp from Knowledge Adventure
Based on the popular Nickelodeon television series, this new PC CD from Vivendi Universal Games is now available for action-loving kids with a PC, Macintosh or Game Boy Advance (cartridge). Join the Martians B-Bop-A- Luna, 2-T-Fru-T and Do-Wah-Diddy for a comedy-filled fun arcade style set of games. It's a 3-D video game adventure with high-resolution graphics and great sounds. Your goal is to prove your abilities by completing 8 outer space challenges from Emperor Bog and help the Martian butt-ugly heroes stop Bog from taking over the Earth
Set in the year 2053, the Butt-Ugly Martians invade Earth by orders of their evil leader Emperor Bog. However, unknown to Bog, his butt-ugly boys don't really want to conquer Earth. They just want to enjoy the fast food, pop culture and video games.
After a quick installation from CD, you're ready to head to the Bog-stacle course. First you'll select 1 or 2-player play, a difficulty level (1, 2 or 3) and then sign in. Next, you'll pick a Butt-Ugly Martian to control. You're start with the space maze, similar to Pak Man and then go on to a space racecourse with lots of humor as you ride to the finish. Next you'll box with your robot opponent and then go on to a Space Invaders style game. Challenge 5 is your next stop at the Great Wall of Humanga for a 3-D form of breakout with great graphics providing outstanding perspective as the balls bounce back toward you. Challenge 6 is another boxing game and obstacle 7 let's you destroy asteroids with your lasers. And finally, your last challenge will be in the Final Battle Arena for more robot boxing. As you play each game you'll earn points towards your final score and final rank. Also, you can repeat a game throughout the course, if you'd like. I thought the Great Wall of Humanga was tons of fun and repeated it several times before going on. My daughters Sarah and Becky thought Butt-Ugly Martians was a great CD. Of course, they had to wait for me to finish before they had their turn.
Butt-Ugly Martians: Martian Boot Camp sells for $29.99 and will run on any multimedia PC, Pentium 266 MHz or faster, 64 MB RAM with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP and a 24x CD-ROM drive. It also runs on a Power Mac G3 266 MHz or faster with 64 MB RAM and a 24x CD-ROM drive.
Howard Berenbon
Software Companies Mentioned
Knowledge Adventure, Inc.
4247 S. Minnewawa Ave.
Fresno, CA 93725
Phone: 1-866-894-0738
URL: education.com
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