P.B. Bear's Birthday PartyP.B. Bear's Birthday Party
Almost any three- to five-year-old child loves teddy bears as much as he or she loves birthday parties. Combine the two and you have a story few children of this age can resist.
Dorling Kindersley Multimedia brings you such a story with P.B. Bear's Birthday Party, an animated story of a teddy bear and his friends celebrating his birthday. Included with the story are games and activities for young listeners.
The story begins when P.B. Bear wakes up on his birthday. From here, children follow him as he celebrates his special day with Dermott the dog, Hilda the hen, Lucy the lamb, and Russell the rabbit. Each page includes a paragraph from the story and an animated scene depicting the events in the paragraph. Children can click to hear all or part of the paragraph read by a narrator or one of P.B. Bear's animal friends. The text has a unique twist--certain words are represented as pictures rather than typed text.
Over half of the pages include a different game that relates to the story. Children reach it by clicking on an icon that appears in the upper corner of the screen or from a game selection screen. The games are very simple and easy for young kids to master. Children over five will quickly become bored.
Installation is straightforward, offering both standard and custom installation options. By design, P.B. Bear's Birthday Party requires very little in terms of system capabilities or hard disk space, a nice change from most multimedia titles.
The title is so simple and offers such limited choices that young children have no problems operating it. However, there is room for improvement. The mouse sprite never indicates when it is OK to click on a picture and when the user should wait because the program is doing something. Children will often interrupt a narration or animation by clicking too soon.
P.B. Bear's Birthday Party's strength is not in the entertainment aspects of its story or the educational content of its games--there are better titles for these. Rather its main attraction is the way it enables young users to develop basic computer skills and become comfortable with a computer. An adult, looking at P.B. Bear's Birthday Party for the first time, might dismiss it as cute but simplistic. Put it in the hands of a three- to five-year-old child and it may turn out to be like the favorite dog-eared book, which is chosen day after day.
For PC: IBM compatible 386DX/25 or faster, 4 MB RAM, 1.6 MB hard disk space, Windows 3.1 or later, single-speed CD-ROM drive (double-speed recommended), Sound Blaster compatible sound card, 640x480 SVGA (256 color) monitor, mouse
