From the moment that the game loaded all three of my children were engrossed in this fun, easy to play game based on the children's television series "Dora the Explorer". The game is designed for very young children who have little or no computer experience. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering hours of fun for both parent and child.
My youngest is 3 years old and an avid Dora fan. He's never played on a computer before, though, so this was a very new experience for him. With two older siblings and parents who are all avid computer users, though, he was already familiar with the concept of cause and effect that moving a mouse or inputting on the keyboard does. My main complaint about the game is that one of the mini-adventures that children have to do in order to complete the storyline requires keyboard input which is more complex than my 3 year old was ready for.
Like the television series, the game follows Dora through a mission, in this case to become a Princess so she can awaken her friend Boots the Monkey. The game is divided into 4 "mini chapters" where Dora has to solve a problem in order to earn part of what she needs to become a Princess. Three of the four adventures can be completed relatively easily with just mouse input from the child. One, however, requires moving Dora through a maze using the arrow keys on the keyboard. The correlation between pressing a particular key and making Dora move in a certain direction was more than my 3 year old could handle, and caused him to quickly loose interest in the game. When I placed him close enough to the screen to be able to point to where Dora needed to go, he was able to easily show me what path she needed to take to reach her goal, so it wasn't the maze itself that was the problem. It was the user interface of having to switch from mouse-play to keyboard-play.
The adventures themselves are designed to reinforce basic preschool skills such as colors, shapes and relative sizes. The game can be set at three different levels in order to challenge children of a variety of abilities. The harder levels require more planning ahead in some games than the early ones, and some have more advanced shapes. Children can play through the adventure multiple times, or they can just choose to play the games without the adventure. I personally like this feature because it lets us play the game even when we are short on time.
The whole adventure only took a bit more than half an hour to go through, which was pretty close to how long my son wanted to pay attention to it. I think he would have stuck with it a bit longer, and I know I would have, if Dora hadn't had quite as much dialogue as she did. Parents who are playing the game with their child may find that they have to talk about what is on the screen in order to keep them involved in the game while Dora chats. The first time through the adventure, I couldn't click or press escape to "fast forward" over the storyline, but when we returned to the game the next day we were able to skip much of the dialogue by clicking ahead.
Overall the game is well worth it for us just to get our son familiar with using a computer mouse, and hopefully keyboard some day. I liked the reinforcement of skills that it provided him as well. And, of course, the fact that he was having fun while learning and kept busy for at least a little while, was a definite bonus.
I’ve played computer games since college, addicted first to story type games like Might and Magic. I have 3 children who also love computer games. My oldest son is a typical kid who loves the challenge of pressing the right combination of buttons and levers on a joystick in just the right way to make something happens, and frequently gets frustrated with mom’s slow fingers. ;) We use computers for both education and entertainment, and sometimes even bribery for good behavior.
The “glory days” of computer gaming for me were when games like Spectre Supreme, Pirate’s Gold, the Might and Magic series, the original Prince of Persia… those sorts of games were coming out on a regular basis. Back then I owned a Macintosh and was a die hard Mac fan. I was one of the first in my area to buy an iMac and on it learned the joy of playing games on the internet like daily crossword puzzle and “mind bender” type puzzles. My first online RPG was given to me for Christmas the year EQ was released, and I was hooked from day one. I played EQ for about a year. I started playing DaoC during late alpha testing, and was hooked on it.. well, to be honest I still am. I’ve tried pretty much every MMORPG I can get my hands on, from big names like EQ, to more obscure ones such as Underlight. I’ve been writing for IMGS since the first DaoC guide, and find I love the challenge of learning a game and presenting what I’ve learned (and sometimes my opinions), to other players.
I’m not a very strong player as far as learning PvE or quick reaction times, so I tend to stay away from games where I’m pitted against someone else in a way that requires physical (rather than mental) response. I still enjoy story and puzzle games, and in a way that’s how I still approach online games. I would much rather spend hours working through a quest than 5 minutes in combat against another player. I still get lost in simulation type games, obsessing over them until I’ve gotten them beaten. And I like being able to sit down at the computer when I’ve got less than half an hour and playing through a few levels of a puzzle game. I tend not to like first-person shooter type games, or anything with person to person violence, so I steer away from them unless they are fantasy based settings. All in all, I enjoy computer gaming so much that my life feels incomplete somehow when my computer is down.
