 At
the start of the program, after a lengthy logo, the King rips through the
top of a hat box, and after uttering two muddled sentences, invites us
through the hole to where Foo Castle stands in all its glory. Letters of
the alphabet are embedded in the brickwork, and when clicked, produce what
I call "jitter action" by falling and bouncing on the lawn, launching towers
like rockets, puffing smoke, etc.
While going through the program, I wished for some control to cut down on the display time of the introductory logo, and to lengthen the display of jigsaw puzzle type games (only about 3 seconds) before they exploded into about 20 pieces for reassembly. Opening the castle door exposes the entrance foyer, with a door, an elevator, a floor mat on the red carpet, two urns on stands and a picture of the King. There are 15 action buttons in this room that opens to new sights, sounds, or exercises. Somewhere in each picture is an arrow that returns you to the previous picture, and a train icon to take you directly to the Expressway To The Games, of which there are 19 major activities with several having sub activities. Buttons over the elevator imply there may be seven floors, but these only produce wacky sounds when clicked. There is a basement, ground floor and one upper floor. Two examples of action buttons are the kings nose, which plunges the screen into blackness, with a red ball appearing, splitting open to reveal the king playing a few notes on his accordion; and the bases of the urns, which cause flowers to grow and a bee to fly from one to the other, when clicked. "Lookee here" is In the upper left corner and gives you sound on or off, quit, and a dead end labeled "about Alfoobet" which gives you no way to continue or go back. Pushing Escape exits the program so you have to start over again. Using the elevator to the basement, clicking is required to enter, change floors, and to exit to the rooms. Somewhere will be a turtle, dog, and rabbit as speed control icons. Clicking a lamp will plunge into blackness, with a flashlight visible, and turning on when clicked. You see a wall with bugs crawling, and a message "I Love You", as you move the flashlight by mouse action. Vowel Chase starts by clicking the animal group,and points are scored by each click on the moving vowel. Egg Drop moves a duck at the top of the screen so that it lays an egg that splatters a target at the bottom. The Spinner is opened by clicking the clock, and pits two mice on squares to advance one or two squares awarded by the spinner pointer. The second floor is the music room, with Grand Piano, pictures of the King and an inch worm, a paint pallet, some blocks and shapes. Click the worm and it crawls across the floor, the king blackens the room except for the piano and 5 music notes. Clicking these puts a performer at the piano to play a short song. Tempo can be speeded up by rapid clicking the mouse. The paint pallet opens an exercise in blending basic colors to produce other colors. The blocks and other shapes allow you to compose by dragging a trail of the selected shapes. . Each door leads to several exercises, which can also be reached by clicking on the train to go directly to the Expressway to the games. There are actually only five rooms that you can enter, but using the Expressway will teleport you to more that twenty locations for activities. The information booklet states that the minimum time to do every activity straight through is about three hours, or longer depending on the span of attention, and the number of interruptions like eating, chores, and other sibling want to play. First the Guide To Alfoobet booklet lists required equipment as an IBM compatible with 8036/25 (?80386/25?) or faster with Win 3.1 or later. A Windows compatible sound card, a video card and monitor with 640/480 and 256 colors, and a minimum of 2mb available ram. The installation program added a requirement of 5 mb of hard drive space. My installation was on a 486/100, 8 mb ram, Reveal sound card, svga monitor and under Kid Desk access control. Installation from two floppies was easy and uneventful. Alfoobet is produced by O'Connor House Software, retails for $39.95 and is recommended for children ages 3 to 8. My daughter (4) and son (6) played with Alfoobet for a while, then went back to some other games. I got the impression that the rewards for correct answers and responses seemed a bit bland to hold their attention, although I can see a great deal of learning to be gleaned from this program. Charles Law is retired military, serving as bombardier in anti submarine warfare in the USN,and flight instructor, test pilot, and reconnaissance in the USAF. He is convinced that most of his computer trouble is caused by being infected with a little knowledge,which makes him his own worst virus. . |