Al Goold, with a little help from Sara and Rachel, take a look at some educational programs from France...
Les Animaux and Les Dinosaures are games designed for children aged three to nine. Now someone obviously thought I was the ideal candidate to review these but I thought instead I would give my kids their big break in journalism, and let them tell you what they think while I watched over their shoulders and took notes. Both games are similar, supplied on HD floppies and as such aimed at Falcon owners, however there is an ST version of Les Animaux on the disk which works fine which is odd! On loading you are greeted by an electronic tune of reasonable quality and both programs allow the background tune to be selected from a choice of three.
The idea of the games is to match the top and bottom half of the various animals or dinosaurs. With 14 dinosaurs and 18 animals part of the fun is creating mix and match species from the hundreds of possible combinations. In addition to mixing up the pictures both games also mix up their names so the top half of a hamster matched with the bottom half of a lion becomes a "HAMON" and, for some reason which didn't quite make it across the generation gap, both the girls found these hilarious.
Pictures can also be displayed as line drawings and "coloured in" by selecting a colour from the palette then selecting an area to fill. On successfully matching the correct top and bottom halves another option is presented. Les Animaux will let you print the picture whereas Les Dinosaures displays a screen telling you a little about the dinosaur itself. Both programs allow pictures to be saved to a floppy disk in PNT format files on the Falcon or Degas low res (PI1) format and these can be converted and output using Imagecopy or other suitable software. I can recommend these programs for as suitable for children up to around seven years old but kids of all ages will find it amusing for a while. The programs are so similar anyone buying both should realise they are almost identical in operation.
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