101 Dalmatians Animated Storybook
Reviewed by Richard Greenhill
Published by Disney Interactive

Age Group: Age 2 to 5, Age 4 to 8 Type: Language Arts Price: $ 49.99 US

PC version requires:
486-50 8 MB RAM, 20 M 2x CD-ROM, Windows 95, 640x480x256, Mouse, Win95 compliant, None.

Mac version requires:
PowerPC

Description:

This is another in the line of Disney Interactive's animated storybooks, focusing on the fun canine adventure of the 101 Dalmatians, based on the feature movie of the same name. 101 Dalmatians will tell your child the story of Pongo and Perdy, and their owners (or "pets" as the dogs call them!) Roger and Anita. The story is told through 15 interactive pages; that is, a page full of areas your child can click on and be rewarded with a short animation. For example, on the first page, Roger is sleeping peacefully in his bed; click on his foot dangling out from under the cover, and watch him wiggle and squirm. Each page has a varying amount of interactivity, which unfortunately, seems to get scarcer towards the later screens. Along with the fun animations, several pages also feature an area to click on which will take you to one of the 4 edutainment subgames within the program. Also, there are 6 sing-a-long songs, with highlighted subtitles, which you can reach through the pages, including the famous "Cruella De Vil" title from the film. This is where the story begins. And finally, to help your child improve their vocabulary, several of the words read to you by the different narrators (characters from the story) can be clicked on, bringing up a dictionary fully explaining what the word means in a simple poem your child will understand.

Installation

Upon placing the CD in the drive, an installation screen will immediately pop up and take you effortlessly through the easy installation procedure. One quibble though: when you run the game, it will not automatically switch your resolution to 640x480, so if you usually run Windows 95 in a higher resolution, the game screen will appear much smaller than it's supposed to.

Comments

On the whole, this is a quality product, but at the price it comes in at, you would expect all of the following problems to have been addressed and dealt with. Sing-a-long now! Firstly, the access time for animations is pretty sluggish. Some respond fast, but most don't start until 3 or 4 seconds after you first click. This can be an eternity for a child who wishes to rapidly zip around and watch the funny animations. Next, the procedure for flipping back and forth between pages could be confusing for young children - to go back a page, you must click on the exit to the left, and to go forward, click the exit to the right; seems logical enough, but the exits can sometimes be very obscure, certainly for a child to spot! Usually, it'll be a door, but sometimes it's a small opening, and on one page, it required a pixel-perfect click to get to the next page, as an animation 'hot'-area was right beside the exit. The games, too, are often slow and uninspiring. They would either be too hard for a child or too dull. The only fun one was a Pac-man like maze game, where you have to direct a puppy to all the objects in the level that begin with the specified letters, while at the same time avoiding the evil Cruella De Vil.

Conclusion

My recommendations are that if your child has a particular preference towards 101 Dalmatians compared to all the other Disney titles, then this would be a solid buy, and keep them amused for a good while. Otherwise, it's just a mediocre animated storybook, and you'd be better off getting one of the more impressively designed storybooks out there, with a different theme. A cool little Pac-man style game. Can you avoid the mean Cruella De Vil?

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