Description:
For devoted fans of Pooh, Piglet, and especially Tigger, it will be a delight to know that now you can visit the bouncy feline on his home turf, cruising the 100 Acre Wood and interacting with many of the most beloved of author A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh characters. Disney's Tigger's Activity Center is an electronic version of games children in the 4- to 8-year age bracket once played with pencils and paper. In Spot the Dots, for example, users click on numbered dots to reveal the outline of a picture. In Bushels of Fun, they sort various vegetables into labeled baskets for Rabbit. Travels with Tigger is essentially a board game, one which lets one or two players race Tigger and Pooh around the Wood, encountering other Pooh characters along the way. Of the entertainments offered, Tigger's Turtle Hurdles is the most challenging and replay-friendly. An exercise in logic, it challenges users to work out a preset pattern of colored turtles. If you can deduce the pattern correctly based on the clues provided, you can build a bridge of turtles for Tigger to bounce across, getting him safely over the river where his friends are waiting. Spot the Dots is also surprisingly appealing, as it proceeds from simple challenges--connecting 10 spots into an easily recognized shape, like a ball--to more complex images. Another nice twist is that several mystery pictures appear on each virtual canvas, eventually forming a larger whole. In contrast, Activity Center's musical game, Tiggerific Tunes, is inflexible, hard to play, and acoustically uninteresting--a much weaker offering than those found in comparable games, while Bushels of Fun is somewhat repetitive. Travels with Tigger makes a good activity for two players, but may run too slowly to keep a single user interested. In other words, Tigger's Activity Center is something of a mixed bag. The game does offer bright and bouncy enjoyment for smaller children, but parents considering a purchase may wish to consider whether the better of its five games--in combination with Tigger's irresistible personality--are the ones most likely to appeal to their children. (Ages 4 to 8) --Alyx Dellamonica
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