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Madeline and the Magnificent Puppet Show is based on the popular Madeline character in books, videos, games, and cartoon series, “Adventures of Madeline.” This game begins by telling a story to set the stage for why Madeline must put together a puppet show. The story introduces the characters and tells everything that children need to find. It gives a few hints on where to find things — a VERY FEW! The goal of this game is to find everything needed to put on a puppet show.
Kids help Madeline find her cape (for theater curtains), collect balloons, dress puppets, paint backdrops, decorate and deliver invitations. The items are located in her house, her neighborhood, the city, and the park. Finding these items was fun, but some are hidden so cleverly that it becomes too challenging (and frustrating) to find them. We finally resorted to looking in the book for help on where the find all the balloons.
Other activities include painting the backdrop for the puppet show. Kids can choose which backdrop they want and paint it with a paintbrush, mix up new colors, or pour paint with a bucket!
Designing the invitations lets children explore their creativity by selecting different colors, type style, stamps, and stickers to use.
Dressing the puppets can be fun. First you have to find eyes for the puppets — then you can choose clothing and hair for each puppet — a boy, a girl, or an animal.
There are some vocabulary games where children can learn new words in French or Spanish. Kristina didn’t have much interest in this, but she’s only 5. There’s also a matching game where you match pictures, picture with French or Spanish words, or English, Spanish, and French words. This is a nice way to gently introduce a different language to young children.
When the big event (the puppet show) finally arrives — it’s almost a letdown. We worked so hard to find everything. Then the puppet show is over and that’s it! The game is over. No more levels to try, no other things to find, you just have to start over. The first time this game can be frustrating for all because it’s so hard to find everything. The problem with this game is that once you done it a couple of times, there’s no more challenge. It gets kind of boring. There’s lots of cute graphics, music, voices and sound effects, but nothing much out of the ordinary.
The creators of Madeline must have realized things were hard to find because they included an answer key in the instruction booklet. A getter way to have handled this would have been to include online clues and hints. This is done a little, but not enough, we found.
Other annoyances include very slow transitions between graphics and pictures, taking over my cursor and not letting me control when to move on, and sound that has lots of static in it. Kristina likes this game, but she doesn’t continue to play it over and over like she does with other games. No thumbs up on this one…
| Product: | Madeline and the Magnificent Puppet Show |
| Company: | Creative Wonders |
| Cost: | $40.00 |
Windows:
486, 8MB RAM, 5MB hard disk space for hard drive installation.
Double-speed CD ROM drive, 256 SVGA card,
Windows-compatible sound card.
Windows 3.1 or higher with MS-DOS 5.0. Windows ’95.
No Spam
Adult 
Gambling
Unfinished
Deception
Plagiarism
Not English
