Alphabet Adventure with Digby & Lydia
Reviewed by Cynthia A. Sorrels
Published by Learning Ladder/Panasonic Interactive Media

Age Group: Age 4 to 8 Type: Language Arts Price: $ 34.95 US

Description:

Alphabet Adventures with Digby and Lydia was designed to introduce youngsters to the alphabet using a story, music and animation. There are songs and QuickTime movies for each letter of the alphabet. Fox kits Digby and Lydia set off with their "cousin," a raccoon, to visit Mrs. Cat. The first question my kids asked was, "Are foxes and raccoons really cousins??" There is an area in the title that explains that foxes are members of the canine family, but it seems like raccoons are marsupials, aren't they? We have plans to look that up, anyway. In each screen, kids must find the butterfly and click on it to advance to the next page. This got old very quickly.

NOTE: Raccoons are NOT cousins to the fox. We checked it out in the World Book 1997 Multimedia Encyclopedia. I don't understand why a title offering factual information about animals would overlook this point! How many parents out there will just say, "Geez, I didn't know raccoons were related to dogs." and the kids will be misinformed. Yech.

When the troop arrives to visit Mrs. Cat, she tells them a poem, omitting the final word. The goal here is to find the correct item and click on it - when that's done, the second part begins - finding the first letter of that word in the graphics. Once that's found, the butterfly search begins, and the advance to the next page begins.

Luckily, there are other options for play, because the adventure section could take all day to complete. We played for several hours and didn't get all the way through. There are two games and a jukebox that are accessed from the main menu - a matching game called the Wheel and a connect the dots that's labeled "ABC." Once the puzzle is complete, kids have the option of printing out the mask. The jukebox plays song and runs animations of each letter of the alphabet. This was the section my 4 year old enjoyed most.

Features:

• Finding the hidden letters
• A song and QuickTime movie for each letter
• Print and color your own masks
• Lots of information about animals

Reactions:

Our 4 year old enjoyed the jukebox but didn't seem to care much for the other parts of this title. I suspect that the reason for this is that the adventure section takes too long to work through. Alphabet Adventures should have included levels of difficulty - there's a world of difference between 4 year olds and 6 year olds.

One interesting note: We tried running Alphabet Adventures on our Pentium 100 system - it performed much better on the 486/66. We changed video drivers on the Pentium but that didn't help matters. The load waits were intolerably long. Go figure...

OK, so here's the answer to the big question: would I buy it for my kids? Nah...it just didn't hold the kid's attention. Check out our Gold Awards in this month's Editorial - those are the truly great ones!

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