Mr. Wonder's Greatest Toyshop on Earth
Reviewed by Jason Levine
Published by Omni Media

Age Group: Age 4 to 8, Age 8 and Up Type: Science Price: $29.95 US

PC version requires:
486-33 8 MB RAM, 0M 2x CD-ROM, Windows 95, also on Win 3.1; 640x480x256

Mac version requires:
Version is available.

Description:

If you've found your way to this review, it's because you're interested in software for kids. If you're in interested in kids' software, you already know that kids learn best when learning is fun. And, for most kids, fun means play. The designers of Mr. Wonder's Greatest Toyshop on Earth (Toyshop) obviously understand that concept perfectly, because they've taken it to its logical conclusion. What could be more fun than to be free to wonder through a store whose walls are packed with toys and to be allowed to take any toy you want off the shelf and play with it? That's the idea behind Toyshop. It has three walls of shelves crammed with colorful toys (97 of them according to the box). Many of the toys animate spontaneously, and all will animate when the child clicks on them with the mouse. A click may produce only a spot animation and sound effects or it may lead to an interactive learning activity.

The activities, for adult analysis sake, can be grouped into five major themes: Making things, energy, weather, animals, and painting. The idea of the making things activities is to stimulate the child's interest in activities beyond the computer. For example, clicking on the toy sailboat produces a series of diagrams for making a sailboat out of household materials such as margarine tubs and plastic bags. Each one of the diagrams can be printed out.

Mr. Wonder also provides voice-over instructions for each activity, and a click on the stack of books next to the main activity screen will provide written curriculum notes for parents, which can also be printed out. Here a note to American parents is in order. When you install Toyshop, you're given a choice between American and British curriculums, and the notes will vary according to your choice. In either case, however, Mr. Wonder (who certainly sounds like a delightful chap) remains distinctly British. American ears will have little trouble understanding him in most cases, but occasionally he will let drop a word or two that may send you to your local library for a look in the Oxford English Dictionary (which, come to think of it, is another, if unintended, educational activity). I personally would like to thank my British colleagues at GamesDomain for informing me that "sweet papers" are what Americans call "candy wrappers," and that "Plasticine" is the British trade name for the substance known to all American parents as "PlayDoh."

Energy activities appear to be designed for the older children in Toyshop's target age group (ages 4 - 9). For example, clicking on the toy oil tanker produces a rather detailed animated lecture on how crude oil is drawn from the earth, turned into petroleum products, and used as fossil fuel. It's well done, but considerably over the heads of the younger members of the age group. On the other hand, it does add to the program's longevity by appealing to a rather broad age range.

Weather-related activities consist of dressing persons or stuffed animals appropriately for the depicted weather. Proper dress is rewarded with a short animated story related to that person or animal.

Toyshop contains several different games about animals. They may involve placing the animals in their proper exhibits at the zoo, feeding them the right food on the farm, finding the proper place for their nests, or leading a lost baby to its mother. Again, correctly completing the activity rewards the child with an animated story.

It seems that every kids' program these days has to have a paint shop feature. Not only is Toyshop no exception to this rule, it actually has several different painting games in it. Although one of them is a free paint program, the others do have an educational purpose. The child is given an object, such as a house or a locomotive and is asked to paint its duplicate. In order to complete the activity, the child has to mix primary colors together to produce new colors. Once again, successful completion rewards the child with an animation.

Parents can monitor their child's activities in the toyshop by clicking on the cash register in the front of the store and calling up reports. The reports monitor the child's progress viz-a-viz the curriculum and can be saved from session to session and printed out. All of this is very well done. Toyshop is such addictive fun for kids that my four-year-old has been playing it for a solid month now almost to the complete exclusion of all his other programs. And there's no sign his interest is waning.

Not So Wonderful

Unfortunately the story of the technical side of Toyshop is not so rosy. Installation under Windows 95 is easy enough. The program installs itself the first time you click on "Play" from the Autoplay menu. It's a "Zero Meg" installation, writing only the files necessary for launching the program and saving sessions and painted pictures to the hard drive. Although no uninstall routine is included, Toyshop does not write to the Windows 95 registry, so the few hard drive files can be removed simply by deleting them.

The problems occur as soon as you try to start Toyshop after installation. The program appears to be extremely picky about video setups. Even though I have a very vanilla Cirrus Logic PCI card and driver, and even though I turned my color resolution down to 256, I got fatal exception error after fatal exception error until I turned absolutely everything off on my desktop before launching the program. Even the little utility in my word processing suite that places launching icons on my task bar seemed to cause conflicts. This would seem to explain why a portion of the very slim jewel case insert that serves as the manual for this program is devoted to potential video card conflicts.

A second problem with Toyshop is its very quirky mouse interface. At random intervals the program stops responding to left button clicks. I noticed this when, on occasion, my four-year-old would suddenly become frustrated with Toyshop's refusal to respond to his directions. Strictly by chance I discovered that at these times only a right click would get the program going again. There's little chance that this could be an intentional "feature" of the program. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when a right click will suddenly be required, and there's certainly no mention of it either in the jewel case insert or in the on-line help files.

Perhaps these interface problems wouldn't be so distressing if technical support were available. Unfortunately, for U.S. customers at least, that doesn't seem to be the case. The toll-free technical support number listed on the package was not functioning when I tried it. Although Omnimedia's UK web site is up and running, nothing there is devoted to technical support.

So it appears that any U.S. parents who purchase Toyshop will be on their own. It's very unfortunate because the program's contents are so strong. But unless you're willing to put up with some potential frustration in getting the program running and some certain frustration with its interface, you should give Mr. Wonder's Greatest Toyshop on Earth a pass.

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