Our Backyard is a Playground
Reviewed by Ty Brewer
Published by Mind Magic

Age Group: Beginners, Age 2 to 5 Type: Keyboard Bangers Price: $20

PC version requires:
486-33 8 MB RAM, 5M CD-ROM, Windows 95,3.x, 640x480x256

Mac version requires:
Version is available.

Description:

Geography for Kids and Insects Our Back Yard is a Playground teaches a little physical and cultural geography about the United States in a delightful way. A lightning bug is your host and the home base is an attic filled with toys to click. Ants are the other main characters in the action while most of the toys dance and sing. Clicking on others propels you into another geographical area with still more clickable items. Each screen has items that are indigenous to the geographical area. A coloring book is included which enables you to color some of the screens with multiple colors and a selection of sizes of pencils/paintbrushes.

Clicking on the sandbox takes us to the Southwest region of the U.S. Area 51 I found myself laughing out loud at the humor hidden in the responses of the characters that popped up. There are plenty of puns and visual jokes (a butterfly that flies is a stick of butter with wings). I do think, however, that most of the humor would be lost on a child. Nevertheless, it is still funny. There are always unusual responses from the characters, and it is not at all predictable what will happen when you push a button. I clicked on the star, then a UFO crashed in the desert - next thing we have is an episode from the X-Files The screens are beautifully detailed with vibrant colors, and the sound effects are great as is the music. I found myself looking for more things to "push" on each screen because I was enjoying the humor. There are a few items that are barely in the picture that you might not think to push, however, these usually had the best effect and should be hunted out. A Regional Flavor The cultural geography of eight regions in the US were depicted with pretty pictures of life in that region. The regions (The Southwest, The Southeast, The Inner City, The Rockies, Alaska, Suburbia, The Midwest, New England, and Hawaii) are defined with humor. For example in The Southwest, a band of rattlesnakes pops out of the ground playing Mariachi music, and in Alaska when you point to the sky an enchanting snowfall falls across the screen with big snowflakes. The humor is a lot of spin-offs of things that very young children probably wouldn't understand, yet might enjoy. In the Rockies, an ant singer who faintly resembles John Denver pops out of the cabin and singing his own rendition of the song "Country Roads". While in Hawaii, there is a scene that pops up where two ants run across the black beaches with their surfboards and a title pops up across the screen - "Antwatch". I found it quite humorous. There is also a Rocky and Bullwinkle spin-off with the bad guys chasing them across the screen in their race cars.

My almost-two-year-old daughter really enjoyed watching this game, and I have had to tell her "no" for two days about using the coloring book on screen. SHE LOVES IT!!!! She would "color" all day on this thing if I had the time to sit here with her all day. It is fun to print out the things she colors. The coloring book - yes, this one is mine The theme of the game was not clearly defined to me before I played, and it took a few minutes before I figured it out. There are occasional words that pop up and the lightning bug spells them out letter by letter, and then he gives a short definition of the word. I didn't like the spelling out loud concept. It was annoying, and did little to build a spelling vocabulary because there were so few of them. It would have been better had the creators made more labels pop up on items and then defined them, and they should have avoided the spelling idea all together. Click on the dock, and out comes the word "costume?" This struck me as weird and out of place. There was no other interaction except for the "point and watch" concept, which some kids may not like. And the sound of the lightning bug's wings flapping became annoying eventually. I still don't understand why the attic scene is there. Well, that's not entirely true. This game is part 4 of a series, and the attic is the "universal home state" for all the games. If you are familiar with the other games, this should be easy to pick up. Still, it was not obvious why they chose the name "backyard" and "attic." The attic seems unrelated to the rest of the screens which are so pretty. There could have been more maps to stress that this was about geography, because the only time a US map popped up was when you were going to another screen. At least the lightning bug and the ants tied all of the screens together. One of several regions (is Suburbia an exact geographical term?) Entertaining Latitudes & Longitudes The good and entertaining things outnumber this program's shortcomings. The coloring book adds a little more dimension to the game and adds to its longevity, but the content is repetitious. I think that young children will love the music, dancing, and action in the game (my daughter is proof of this). Older children will probably think it is cute for a while, but may soon get bored because it is not interactive enough for them.

If you have any problems when using Kids Domain then please contact Cindy, who will be happy to help where possible.

[Beginners - Ages 2-5 - Ages 4-8 - Ages 8 up - Grownups]

[Subject Indexes - Kids Home - Online Games - Grownups Place]

Copyright ⌐ Kids Domain, 1998.