Zoo Explorers & Ocean Explorers
Reviewed by Debbi Rapp
Published by Comptons NewMedia
Age Group: Age 2 to 5, Age 4 to 8
Type: More Fun
Price: $39.99Description:
Zoo Explorers and Ocean Explorers are educational, entertaining tours of the world of animals and undersea life respectively. Ostensibly designed for ages 3 to 9, I have to admit that I was also fascinated (and learned a couple of things too). Simple main menus in each game takes you into the various areas with a single click of the mouse. Zoo Explorers (left picture) has 9 main areas, while ocean explorers has 6. From there you will go to other point and click menus, games, activities, music videos, and films.
ZOO EXPLORERS
The pop song that opens the game has a catchy tune and easy words, sure to be sung around the house by your children. Each of the nine pictures on the main menu takes you to a different area, each with different types of activities such as educational videos, games, and entertainment. Clicking on the giraffe or the stork takes you to educational videos. Gilda Gorgeous, the giraffe features videos by zookeepers who tell you about the various animals found in the zoo. The stork shows short movies about baby animals. There is quite a variety to choose from, so each time your child plays, there is something new to learn. Designed for short attention spans, the animations are not overly long and contain information easily digested by young children. Hedda Feathers the Ostrich, the Toy Train, and Large Lenny the walrus lead to entertainment sections. Hedda introduces music and comedy videos, from bears doing Shakespeare to the Zoo-Opolis rap video. The tunes are catchy and the videos entertaining. Choosing the train takes you to a set of tunnels and tracks, the inside of the train engine, and pictures and music. Large Lenny tells jokes that are really funny to the younger set: Where does a crocodile keep his money? In the riverbank, of course. Surely the most popular areas will be the games, some of them educational and all of them pretty fun. Play picture games with Splash the penguin or puzzle games with Wally Wallaby. His Shuffle puzzle where you create "new" animals by interchanging the head, torso, and legs of existing animals is sure to be a hit! Penny Panda's playroom is full of all kinds of items to "play" with and includes a hidden jungle adventure where you find Penny's little friends and bring them back to the playroom. Miss Hippo hosts a series of matching games for the young and young-at-heart.Along the way, you can earn tokens which you can take to the Bubble Machine. After dragging the token to the coin slot, a bubble machine spits out bubbles which you click on with your mouse to pop. This was the only let down of the program. Since it's not on the menu and you have to "earn" tokens to play, I was expecting something really spectacular. It was pretty simplistic, even for kids.
OCEAN EXPLORERS
Starting with a great song with a calypso beat, Ocean Explorers promises and delivers a lot of fun. In the main menu, Zippy the Bathysphere tells you about each of the five habitats on the screen (when your cursor turns into a question mark near a habitat) and inside his master control room when you click directly on him. Each of the other five pictures takes you to a specific habitat with informational videos and games. In each of the habitats are pictures of creatures that live in that environment. Click on the creature for a short informational video packed with information about the entity you selected. Although picture quality on some of the movies could be a little better, they were very interesting, and not only for kids. Did you know that manta rays are basically flattened sharks... or that sharks have three eyelids? You learn interesting bits of trivia that is easily remembered and great to amaze your friends.Each area has a host, such as Spike the Sea Urchin or Clyde the Giant Clam. Clicking on the host takes you to their games. Play Spikes matching games or Gabby Garibaldi's Guess Who and Rub-a-dub. For just plain fun, create some crazy-looking fish in Clyde's Fish Gumbo. In Spout's ABC game, click on a letter to place the creature beginning with that letter on the screen. Finally, search through four screens of a coral reef to "Find the Fish" that Sammy is looking for. The games range from very easy to slightly challenging. When you do something right, the game is very generous with praise... perfect for building self-esteem.
Two special areas are the Playroom and the Sunken Pirate Ship. Get to the playroom by clicking on Zippy the Bathysphere in the main menu. Inside Zippy's control room, look out the peepholes, activate the periscope, watch some movies, or go to the playroom. Inside the playroom you can color, each some lunch, or watch some cartoons. The cartoons are great--old black and white toons from the 50's like Felix the Cat in Neptune Nonsense. You can get to the sunken pirate ship by getting treasure from the other games. Click on the treasure and you are whisked away to a new area of fun. Here you can opt for more cartoons, learning about famous pirates, or play a fishy shoot-out game. Each time you get a treasure, there is a place to fit it in a puzzle before you go to the inside of the ship. I was a little disappointed that when I had gotton the last piece, nothing dramatic happened.
INSTALLATION, GRAPHICS, & SOUND
This was a normal windows installation - no surprises here. Most of the game is played from the CD, however a program called QuickTime (included) must be installed. It was installed when I set-up the first CD, but when I went to install the other CD, it said it couldn't be found and installed it again. I still haven't figured out where either copy was put.I was impressed with most of the graphics, details are sharp and clear. In Ocean Explorers, the quality on some of the videos could have been better and some of the "movies" were really only a slide show, which seemed a little cheesy considering the quality of the rest of the program.
I have ProAudio Spectrum 16 and the Gravis Ultrasound on my computer. I have no idea what the program was using but it sounded great, and that's really all I care about. Voices were clear and easy to understand and the music was several cuts above the normal canned stuff that usually comes on games.
OVERALL IMPRESSIONS
On the downside: The biggest overall problem that I had with the package was that my double-speed CD-Rom was simply not up to some of the tasks. In anything where I had to rapid click, such as the Bubble Machine, the game would periodically freeze, while the CD player caught up. The quality of the videos in Ocean Explorers could have been better, although the ones in Zoo Explorers were pretty good. Also, the game pronounces sea anemone wrong.I tried to approach playing the games like a kid would. Other than checking the booklet for installation instructions, I just sat down to play around without reading any directions. At first I thought, "this is cute, but I don't think it will hold anyone's attention for very long". Then I found something else... and something else... and something else... etc. Before I knew it, my husband was asking me if I ever planned to get off the computer! Aptly named, Zoo Explorers and Ocean Explorers allows you to do just that - explore. And with each discovery comes a whole lot of fun. Written to the level of children without talking down to them, it's for the young and the young-at-heart. Once you're into it, you're having so much fun, that you almost don't realize how much knowledge you're also getting. I wish they had this kind of stuff out when I was a kid.
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