From: sterling@PANINI.CS.NYU.EDU (John Sterling)
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: Mac Games for Kids
Date: 28 Jul 92 17:27:22 GMT
Organization: New York University


Regarding good Mac games for kids:

My kids are currently 3 & 5.  (There's also an almost one year old,
but for this discussion she doesn't count.)  We have had lots of games
of one sort or another in the house.

I'll second the motion for Manhole, Cosmic Ozmo and Spelunx.  Manhole,
the first, was actually my favorite because where ever you were in the
world you were exploring you might suddenly find yourself back in
another part, by having gone into a painting, or climbing up through a
tower only to find yourself on top of a rook on a chess board in a
different sceneario.  Also, whatever you clicked on in Manhole that
looked interesting invariably did something.  Too often I would expect
something neat to happen in Cosmic Ozmo and there would be nothing.
I'd like to see the CD-ROM version.  Haven't explored Spelunx much
yet.

In a similar vein, the Amanda Goodenough stories are very nice.
Especially for the younger set.  My eldest learned much about using
the mouse from her stories.  This was pre-Manhole.

Any paint program is great.  KidPix is a big hit because of all its
bells&whistles, figuratively and literally.  But I have noticed that
with my kids, the features seemed to diminish the creativity that they
displyed with more basic paint programs.

I disagree with one note that Reader Rabbit is "The worst".  My kids
loved Reader Rabbit and Math Rabbit, and now Outnumbered!  These are
all from The Learning Company.  Both kids have loved them.  They were
entertaining as games before the kids "learned" the stuff for the more
advanced parts and continued to be fun as they mastered the
challenges.  I don't know how valuable they are as learning tools, but
as games they have rated well in our home.  Actually, Outnumbered! has
definitely motivated both of them to improve their arithmetic skills.
I hadn't even imagined that they were ready for some of the problem
types that they have learned to solve in order to play.  Outnumbered!
was the #1 favorite game in the house for abut five months and only
started to get displaced when KidPix came in.  (A not particularly
desirable side effect of this was that the three year old even adopted
the persona of one of the characters in the game for a few months.  I
am much happier that he has lately chosen to be a cat.)  I look
forward to seeing The Learning Company's other offerings, which,
unfortunately seem to come the Macintosh only after having been on the
ibm/pc shelves for some time.

Also in the "educational" line are KidsTime and Playroom, which are
similar.  Playroom is better packaged.  (Kidstime is a set of separate
games, Playroom is an integrated set of games with a mouseable
frontend that does nice things even without clicking.  And it has lots
of sound effects.)  Both have gotten a lot of play.  The best part of
Playroom is the set of three or four "colorforms" sets.  You get a
background scene to which you can add figures.  A separate figure for
each letter of the alphabet.  Each background scene has its own set of
figures.  Both products are designed to introduce letter and number
recognition skills in an entertaining environment.  Finally trashed
Playroom because of the annoyance of the copy protection - have to
insert the original disk each time you play.

The three-year-old likes SimAnt.  The elder enjoys all three of
SimCity, SimEarth and SimAnt.

We have just gotten Just Grandma and Me.  But it fails to run on my
MacII under 6.0.7.  Broderbund tells me I need 32-bit Quickdraw and
recommends that I upgrade to System 7.

Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego was popular with the elder, but he
needed assistance looking up the information in the pocket
encyclopedia provided.  Given limited hard disk space, it was taken
off.  If we get more space it'll make a come-back.

For the moment the elder's favorite game is Glider.  We have the
shareware version.  (The commercial version adds color among other
things.)  I expect that this is a short infatuation.  It is the first
"arcadish" game I have let them have, due to the difficulty they have
with the frustration and addiction of that kind of thing.  Glider is
reasonably mellow on both fronts.  Though he sure is hooked for the
last few days.

Flight simulators are fun, too.  We have Chuck Yeager's.  It's got a
flight school mode that works well for the five-year-old.