Hot Wheels Custom Car Designer
Reviewed by Jason Levine
Published by Mattel Media

Age Group: Age 4 to 8, Age 8 and Up Type: Art & Creativity Price: $20.00 US

Description:

Hot Wheels Custom Car Designer allows kids to create all kind designs and accessories to go with the mega-popular Hot Wheels cars and tracks. Kids can print out stickers with which to decorate their hot wheels cars and track sets, accessories for the tracks, such as grandstands, barriers, and carwashes, and even "business" cards, letterheads, and pretend driver's licenses, traffic tickets, and license plates.

Features:

• 20 on-screen Hot Wheels cars to customize with paint jobs, tires, spoilers, engines, logos, and decals.
• Stickers for the "real" Hot Wheels cars and tracks can be designed and printed out.
• Personalized birthday cards, letterheads, newsletters, and "business" cards with Hot Wheels motifs can be created.
• Pretend driver's licenses, license plates, traffic tickets, grandstands, pennants, barriers, car washes, and other accessories for Hot Wheels tracks can be printed out.
• Trophies and ribbons for prize-winning races and "most outrageous" crashes can be printed out.
• Designed to work with removable Avery Kids labels (a selection of 7 different sheets is included in the package).
• Includes a plain white-colored Hot Wheels VW Microbus dragster, ideal for decorating with the printed stickers.

Technical Aspects:

Windows 95 autoinstall ran painlessly with this program, and we experienced no bugs or other difficulties in running the program. Load times for the program's various features, and especially for printouts, however, were very long on a Pentium 120 with 16 MB RAM (well above the listed minimum configuration of 486-66 with 8 MB RAM). You'll probably be much happier with at least a Pentium 133 and 32 MB RAM.

Report and Conclusions:

Our 5-year-old (the minimum recommended age) had a lot of fun designing his own cars in the Customizing Garage and selecting stickers to print out and apply to his own Hot Wheels toys. (Note: Be sure that your kids use only the Avery Kids labels and stickers supplied with the program or extra ones that you purchase, because, unlike regular Avery labels, the Kids products are easily removable from almost any surface.) He also got a kick out of printing out grandstands and carwashes to go with his cars. The only fly in the ointment was the long load times specified above. Usually, after waiting 5 minutes or so for something to print out, he would leave the computer for some other activity, returning only when the printer finally started spitting out the paper.

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