Bear Family Adventure 
a review by Ken and AnaLisa Ashworth, Alamo PC

 Oh, excuse me. My four-year-old daughter AnaLisa and I have just finished reviewing "A Bear Family Adventure, Playtime in the Park." This is a CD-ROM presented by Good Housekeeping. It is a Kidsoft Select "fun-filled learning adventure" for ages 3-5.

 It requires an IBM compatible (386DX/33 or better), 4MB RAM, 5 MB of hard disk space, Super VGA color video card and monitor with 640x480 resolution and 256 colors, a mouse, CD-ROM drive and a Sound Blaster 16 or compatible sound card. They offer technical support, which we did not need to check out, 7 days a week.

 To start our review, we loaded the CD-ROM. Piece of cake. It loaded faster than any CD-ROM I've ever loaded. Up popped an ICON, on which we double clicked, and off we went.

 First a happy little song with bears inviting us to join them in an adventure. Click any of the 5 bears to begin exploring different types of activity in the park:

• Painting, "paint" ten different scenes. Cleanup not required.
• Puzzle solving, four different types of puzzles you can choose: Memory, Word/Shape match, Mazes, and Create your own picture. No loose pieces to pick up.
• Reading, click on a picture and the starting letter of the object displays, click on the associated word, and the narrator reads the word.
• Connect-the-dots, and learn how to count, learn colors, as well as shapes.
• Story in the park, explore six different scenes in the park. The narrator reads the words, and a click on the figures, makes them to come to life. This is the part AnaLisa enjoyed the most.

 We ran the CD-ROM on a 386/33 w/4 mg RAM PC and it was slow in loading the pictures. On a 75 MHz Pentium, it ran great.

 Bottom line: would I recommend buying this CD-ROM or any of the other Kidsoft Select products? You bet! We've purchased other child specific software and have not been impressed. Kidsoft Select, on the other hand, is good stuff.