Great Adventures by Fisher-Price Castle
Kids Are Heroes In Great Adventures Castle
A Review of Great Adventures by Fisher-Price Castle
Judy Pozar
Great Adventures by Fisher-Price Castle is an interactive goal-oriented game that will captivate the imagination of young children. When the program starts, Jester provides the background, accompanied by flashback scenes. Bad King Smudge and his Naughty Knights have captured King McBeard and his Castle, sending the Good Knights fleeing into the village. Your job is to help the brave McDuff find the Good Knights, storm the castle, and rescue King McBeard from the Dungeon.To find the knights, you travel around the kingdom and engage in various activities. In the marketplace, you make several trades until you can trade for the Good Knight hidden there. At the tournament, you participate in a cannon-firing contest. Other activities require matching shapes in stones, and patterns in iridescent magic crystals. Once the knights have all been recruited, they storm the castle, under the direction of McDuff, with help from your child. And they all live happily ever after. The End.
The technical quality of this product is excellent, and it installs easily. You can choose “Full Install” to load the whole program to your hard drive for maximum performance, if you have 35MB to spare. Alternatively, you can choose the CD Only option, which requires just 1 MB disk space. If you’re running Windows 95, you can take advantage of the AutoPlay feature. The program will start up when you insert the CD-ROM — no need for a child to click on any icons to launch it.
The scenes of a medieval kingdom and castle are richly colored and detailed. Period music adds to the fairy-tale atmosphere. Sound effects are excellent, also. Most voices have a British or Scottish accent, but oddly, one knight sounds like John Wayne. Another, Sir Lift-a-Lot, says in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator voice, “I’ll be Back!” A few other attempts at humor will go right over the little tikes’ heads, but will provide a bit of amusement for parents as they play along.
Probably my biggest objection to Great Adventures by Fisher-Price Castle is its awkward name! If the publisher must include the maker in the title, they could have chosen Great Adventures Castle by Fisher-Price or The Fisher-Price Great Adventures Castle. But I digress.
The product specifies an age range of 4 to 8. The games’ activities encourage goal-setting, planning, fantasy and role-playing. They develop some very basic skills in counting and pattern recognition, but these are fairly simple activities, suitable for children aged 3 to 6. Activities are repetitive, with little difference from one playing session to the next, and the end of the game is always the same. This lowers the “Replayability” factor, so important in many parents’ decisions about which games to purchase. However, my five-year-old has been playing it almost daily for weeks now, and he usually chooses to watch the opening sequences every time, even though he knows he can bypass them by pressing the SPACEBAR. Perhaps some repetitiveness is not a negative factor for children this age (we all know they can watch their favorite videos or hear their favorite stories hundreds of times without any loss of interest). He rates Great Adventures by Fisher-Price Castle (“Great!”) more highly than I do (“Above Average”). Take your pick.
School House Scorecard
| Product: | Great Adventures by Fisher-Price Castle |
| Company: | Davidson & Associates, Inc. |
| Cost: | $34.99 |
System Requirements:
486/33MHz or faster DOS-compatible computer; 8MB of RAM; hard disk with 1 MB free disk space (35 MB for full installation); Sound Blaster or almost any Windows Multimedia sound card; Windows 3.1 or higher; double-speed CD-ROM drive; Mouse; SVGA card (256 colors).
Breakdown:
Ease of Use 5
Learning Value 3
Entertainment Value 3
Graphics 5
Sound 5
Overall Score:
(* 0 rating, 0 votes)
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