 Foo
Castle is a game designed to appeal to children from about three to eight.
If my favorite testers - my 5 and 3 year old granddaughters - are typical,
then your children/relatives will enjoy the game.
It installed from the two floppies without any trouble and if you have a sound card, 2 MB RAM, and a monitor/video card capable of handling 256 colors you're all set to go. It took just under 5 MEGS of hard drive space. Now, a small word of warning - some of the kids might not appreciate the ghost, the witch, the skeleton or the bats but they can be ignored safely by not clicking on them or their hiding places which are clearly shown in the small (24 page) manual. My girls did NOT like the "bad" things but did like the rest. This is not a major problem with the program and the older kids might well like them. The game is designed to encourage the kids use of the mouse and to help learn and perfect the click and drag needed for most programs. The kids use the mouse to navigate through the Castle and to play many of the games inside. There are 12 different things to click on just at the entry of Foo Castle - from turning on the path lights to getting music to play. The man in the moon also will talk at you. Once inside you can wander through rooms on the main and second floor. The rooms are where the games are - and on the second floor you also find the skeleton, witch, spiders, bats and dragons. (See warning above). Younger kids will like the first floor better. The first floor has the throne room game room, library, colors game, shapes, etc. These games are not real hard for the younger kids but some of them will make the adults work a bit. For example, the jigsaw puzzles require a bit of memory work as well as clicking and dragging the pieces back to where they belong. The clock game has you trying to touch the clock face with the cursor and - at the "rabbit" setting, this takes a LOT of coordination. (I beat the five year old, but it was not easy). At a lower setting such as "turtle" the three year old racked up a competitive score. The game cheats a bit in that it teaches the kids about numbers, letters and colors while they are having fun connecting dots, working shapes and other activities that are accompanied by nice music and bright colors. The manual states that there are two or three hours worth of entertainment in just clicking around the Castle. I believe it! The girls didn't get tired of it although they did want to jump around the various rooms to see what is available. They really liked the "Crazy Room" since it seemed to have 11 different activities. Be advised some of them are a bit loud, but that's part of the fun. O'Conner House Software developed this game with the idea of building something for the developer's grandkids. He wanted to encourage learning "colors, the alphabet, lower numbers, reading hourly times on both digital and conventional clocks, matching two and three dimensional shapes, manual dexterity, concentration and patience". They succeeded. The game is worth adding to your library if you have young children starting to learn how to master the computer - this will really help. |