Adventures with Edison

(Mis)Adventures With Edison

A Review of Adventures with Edison

Jackie and Kristina Wheeler

Adventures with Edison is really 3 separate games: Mystery at the Museums, Wild Science Arcade, and Rock and Bach Studio. And I do mean separate. Pet peeves of mine include having to reenter information such as my name — and Edison made me do this every time I entered a different game. It appears Corel packaged three separate games together on one CD and tried to make them appear integrated. One of the things I did like was the ability of the child to tailor the appear of Edison. Except of course, everytime you entered another game, he lost his previous appearance and you had to change him again. Still, Kristina had fun creating a blue Edison with pink and green clothes.

Mystery at the Museums. I like the premise of this game — something mysterious is happening at the museums. Priceless international treasures have been misplaced and it’s up to Edison (with your child’s help) to solve puzzles, hunt through museums to find the treasures. This game includes different playing levels and even allows children to customize playing levels.

A map is provided that displays the museum buildings. Puzzles include memory games, logic games and just for fun puzzles. All puzzles have scores and timers. Whenever your child finishes a game, the scores are added up and shown to you in Smitty’s office. Animations and facts help make these puzzles fun and entertaining. This was our favorite part of Adventures with Edison. Even though Kristina is only 5, there were pattern matching and memory games that kept her attention. Positive reinforcement was included for each win.

Wild Science Arcade. This activity combines fundamental principles of physics (gravity, friction, magnetism, electricity) with challenging arcade-style games. Children guide balls through a maze of approximately 100 rooms. The first room includes several doors that lead to different parts of the game. Kristina and I never got past this room, but she is a little young for this Adventure. Children can select from different types of balls — rubber, glass, lead, etc and see how the balls change when pushed and rolled. Children can set gravity and friction to different levels and see the effects on the balls and how they roll and bounce. This game seemed to go on forever with no clear goals in mind. We couldn’t proceed to other rooms and it kept asking for a Warp password that we didn’t know.

Rock and Bach Studio. I had more troubles here. The idea of a music-oriented studio is great, but most of the sound didn’t work with my computer. I expect if I can get any of the game’s sound to work, then it all should. Not the case in the Studio. None of the compositions we selected played, even though we saw the animation. Maybe it will work on computers with true Sound Blaster cards, but this has been the only game we’ve never been able to bring up the sound on. There are several rooms to explore in Rock and Bach — assemble bands from a cast of funny characters. You can teach them your own songs or select from the Studio’s own collection. There’s a music library, sound library, instrument room and drum clinic. They would probably be fun, but we didn’t spend long in here since we couldn’t hear anything.

Other annoyances include slow transitions between graphics, sounds that didn’t match up with the animation, and pictures taking over my cursor and not letting me control when to move on. Kristina says she enjoyed this game, but she hasn’t picked it to play since we first got it. No thumbs up on this one…

School House Scorecard

Product:	Adventures with Edison
Company:	Corel Corporation P.O. Box 3595 Salinas, CA 93912 Phone: 1-800-455-3169

Cost:

$42.00

Macintosh: N/A
Windows:
486, 4MB RAM, Hard drive and CD ROM drive,
Sound Blaster or 100% compatible sound card,
Super VGA video card and monitor (640×480, 256 colors)
and Windows 3.1 or higher.