The Fennels Figure Math
Reviewed by Jason Levine
Published by McGraw-Hill Home Interactive

Age Group: Age 8 and Up, Adults Type: Math Price: $ 39.95 US

PC version requires:
486-66 8 MB RAM, 8 MB RAM, 2x CD-ROM, VLB/PCI, Windows 95, 640x480x256

Mac version requires:
Version not available.

Description:

The Fennels' house is as wacky as they come. Great-Great-Grandfather Bezel started it years ago by collecting wonderful and magical things from all over the world and building the house to store the stuff in. Today the house has a North Pole Room to store ice sculptures, vines growing wild in the Jungle Room, aliens inhabiting the Backyard Trailer, and a pair of ducks doing one- act plays in the Teepee Lounge.

The house also seems to be a time portal of sorts. That's how Uncle Bobby (who thinks he was raised by apes) is able to host a party in the dining room with guests that include Albert Einstein and Atilla the Hun. As the story opens, Uncle Bobby's nephew and niece, Baxter and Frizzie Fennel, discover that they were supposed to bring the food for the party. Now they must search all over the house to find the food listed on the menu and satisfy the hungry guests.

The Fennels Figure Math is an adventure game. Taking the part of Baxter, the player searches the house for the food items needed to make up the menu for Uncle Bobby's dinner party. As in most adventure games, the player has an inventory to manage. Items found in one location can be stored in Baxter's Stuff Bag and used in another location. The use of such items is always fairly obvious and doesn't involve any difficult manipulation.

What makes Fennels different from other adventure games is that, instead of having to solve abstract or story-related logic puzzles to advance in the game, the player must solve math problems. There are three difficulty levels of math problems to choose from when starting the game, "tough," tougher," and "torture," which are actually simple match logic, more difficult math logic, and complex math logic. Developer Dr. Barbara Kurshan has designed the math problems in accordance with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards. Based on those standards, the problems are designed to build skills in such areas as computation and estimation, algebra, measurement, problem solving, communication, and deductive and inductive reasoning.

>Fennels is very well done. The graphics are all imaginative, colorful and done in the kind of skewed-angle cartoon style that should appeal greatly to the "Nickelodeon" generation (ages 8 - 12) that the program is aimed at. The math problems are superbly integrated into the adventure game story. For example, when Baxter enters the kitchen, he accidentally knocks down the slate board that has the quiche recipe written on it. The player must then solve a spatial relationship puzzle to put the recipe back together again (at the torture level it's a challenge even for an adult). After recovering the recipe, the player must confront a clever, talking-cow milk dispenser that requires the player to convert the amount of milk listed in a recipe for one into the amount necessary to feed all the guests. Although I am not personally versed in the math levels that kids in the target age group should achieve, I could see that there is a noticeable jump in the difficulty of the problems with each increase in skill level. So Fennels should have very good longevity. Aiding replayabililty are random location of inventory items and random problem generation with each new game.

Plenty of player aids are also included. A general hint can be obtained by clicking on the Hot Line phone that always present at the lower right-hand corner of the screen. More detailed hints in the form of problem-solving demos, called "Brain Boosters" in Fennels, can be accessed from the Guide Book that Baxter always has with him. Players can also choose to skip the adventure game aspect of the program, by going directly to the room called "The Pit." There the player can drill on all the math problems in the game by clicking on the machines that are located throughout the house in the adventure game.

A Few Technical Trifles

I have only a few quibbles with Fennels, all of them technical in nature. First is the Direct-X installation. Fennels insists on installing its included Direct-X drivers whether you want it to or not. Since the included drivers are version 3, this didn't cause me any problems, but it will be a headache for anyone with a custom video setup. Aside from that misstep, Fennels installs easily from its autoplay menu, and can be uninstalled either from its setup menu or from the Control Panel. Fennels only writes about 8 MB to the hard drive, but the trade-off for that is a pause for CD access between each scene in the game.

My second quibble is that Fennels requires your video resolution to be set at 256 colors or it won't run at all (which seems odd for a Direct-X program). This is a real annoyance if you have to reboot Windows 95 after resetting your resolution. However, downloading and installing the free PowerToy "Quickres" from Microsoft does away with the need to reboot and, therefore, most of the annoyance. Click here to go to the Microsoft PowerToys page.

My final and perhaps most serious quibble is with Fennels' mouse cursor. The cursor appears in the form of stylized star that changes color whenever you move it over a hot spot. There's nothing wrong with that except that it works exactly the same way for exits from one screen to another. As a result, you often can't tell whether you have the cursor over an active object or a screen exit. Several times I thought I had the cursor over an object to be taken or examined, such as a picture on the wall, only to find myself in a different location when I clicked the mouse button. Some frustration could have been avoided simply by having the cursor change to a pointer for screen exits.

But, as I say, these are just quibbles that are more than compensated for by Fennels' many strengths. There are a lot of math programs out there, but you would have a hard time convincing kids that most of them are fun. That definitely won't be a problem with The Fennels Figure Math.

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