Description:
Children in the 4- to 8-year age range get a trio of terrific games in one box with the Land Before Time Three Pack, a collection of previously issued programs featuring Littlefoot, Ducky, Petrie, and all of their friends. Fans of the Land Before Time movies can save their favorite young dinosaur from harm, create artwork featuring the characters, challenge the dinosaurs to musical hide-and-seek, and a great deal more. In Land Before Time Math Adventure, players must help Littlefoot and his friends negotiate a variety of perils by solving simple equations. A typical activity has most of the dinosaur gang trapped behind a lava flow. Kids answer easy questions--Is four greater than nine?--and when they are correct, Ducky moves forward on a mission to rescue the others. The game offers three levels of difficulty with a number of questions per activity, creating a package that is certain to give a player's math skills a decent workout. Though its graphics are out-of-date compared to more recent games, Math Adventure delivers on its promise--helping kids practice computation and entertaining them in the process. Land Before Time Kindergarten Adventure is an activity center with a well-rounded series of games designed to appeal to many types of players. Prehistoric Pinball and Sharptooth Gulch are the fast-paced options from this collection, offering arcade-style action and little educational content. However, Kindergarten Adventure also includes two musical activities, a board game, and some drawing games. The number of choices ensures that it has something to offer children with differing interests. The third member of the three-pack is the Land Before Time Activity Center, which collects still another set of games. These are less focused than those in Math Adventure and less entertainment based than those in Kindergarten Adventure; ultimately, they are more oriented toward testing a child's analytical skills. The Egg Roll game, for example, challenges users to chart and construct a safe path for a rolling dinosaur egg, avoiding lava flows and hard rocks to finally end up in a safe, soft nest. Cave Concentration is a matching game, where players try to find pairs of similar insects within a series of dark caves. The Land Before Time Three Pack provides a significant amount of variety within its three-CD package, and of these, a single activity (Bramble Maze, in Activity Center) is the lone option that is clunky and difficult to use. Everything else is tidily designed, simple to understand, and fun to play, all the while offering a degree of exercise for young wits. Whether children are interested in exploring their own creativity by making up a story, playing Dino-Trivia to see how much they have already learned, or simply up for a bit of arcade-style maze running, this package can meet--even exceed--their needs. (Ages 4 to 8) --Alyx Dellamonica
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