Curious George Early Learning Adventure
Reviewed by Cynthia A. Sorrels
Published by Houghton Mifflin Interactive

Age Group: Beginners, Age 2 to 5, Age 4 to 8 Type: Thinking Games Price: $49.95

Description:

Curious George Early Learning Adventures takes your child on a trip to the Arcade with George the Monkey! They'll have a fun-filled afternoon of shooting circles, singing, pie throwing, food catching and puzzles galore. Who knows, you might even get around to printing out your own Curious George Storybook. The title consists of six activities with multiple skill levels, which all feature the gentle humor Curious George made famous. Curious George!

Features:

• Jingles Jukebox - help write the song!
• Pie Fight - Splat or be splatted.
• Star Patrol - blast those shapes and colors.
• Super Fruit Catch - can you catch it?
• Print - your own Curious George Storybook
• Parent's area for progress reports

Notes:

Getting this title to run correctly was a nightmare. Don't even bother trying to install to a removable disk or Zip drive, your system will go C-R-A-S-H! Even after installing on our hard drive and freeing up some space on it, we experienced multiple crashes and have reinstalled the product at least six times in the past 24 hours.

Not good. To be fair, my system is a bit below the title's system requirements, but usually the additional memory I've installed will compensate for any problems. Not this time, though.

The title's booklet gives technical contact information for Houghlin Mifflin Interactive, but doesn't give any troubleshooting info. For that, there's a brief text file on the CD-ROM - it did help me figure out why the audio wasn't playing and corrected that, at least...but once it was playing, it was still choppy, especially during jukebox sequences.

Reactions:

Well, I can't honestly tell you to go buy this title. As much as I love Curious George, I hate titles that require reconfiguring my entire system. But the fact is that my 2 and 3 year old love that monkey - when I asked our 3 year old what I should tell people about this title, she said, "It's SO cool." The games are excellent for developing spatial skills and lay a good foundation for pre-reading. There's even a Parent's section that shows how long the child spent on each activity and what they scored! It's just a shame the technical problems interfere with the quality of game play.

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