Customer Reviews

Curious George Preschool Learning Games

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have taught computer lab to preschool children for two years and have used this program both years with much success. It is a great game for my older 3 year old students and my 4-5 year old students. The boys love the rocketship shooting shapes game, and everyone thinks the pie fight is funny. The puzzle game is also popular.

The only problem that I have had with this game is that the menus can be hard for a young child to navigate if he is unfamiliar with it - some require reading (i.e. "start" or "play"). But once they have an understanding of how to make the games work, they do wonderfully.

I have also noticed that the only way to exit the pie fight game is to lose - if you keep answering correctly, it will play almost indefinitely (more than 10 minutes in a preschoolers' mind is FOREVER). You should see the look of confusion when I tell a child that he must LOSE the game in order to play something else - they are so programed to only WIN!

Overall, I recommend this game to anyone with preschoolers.

Note: I have successfully used this program on both Windows XP and Windows Professional 2000. Works great on either platform.

My just-turned-four-year-old *loved* this CD! We checked it out from the library, and after playing it with him, and seeing how much he learned & how much he loved it, we bought it. The Jukebox game encouraged the emerging skill of rhyming. The Star Patrol reinforced shapes, and encourged learning some new ones (hexagon, etc.). The Pie game was his favorite. This game encourged sorting (same, different, slightly different). We've played many a CD-rom, and this one, by far, is the easiest on parents. No annoying sounds or voices. And the animation looks just like the book, so it's familiar and soothing.

We checked this out from the library (actually it is an early version called "Curious George Early Learning Games") and our 2 1/2 year old daughter loved it. She finds the error signs amusing (eg. a pie in the face). We like it because the voices a re smooth and non-irritative; they are normal speech in appropriate pitch, and therefore easy to understand. Furthermore, the words flow together well, without the typical computer pauses. Best of all, this program has a very nice puzzle game, which plays to one of our daughter's strengths.

I bought this because my son liked another Curious George game, Downtown Adventure (which I highly recommend but the age range should be 4-8, not 3-6). This game is from a different company and is of very poor quality. The pie fight game crashes in the middle every single time we play, on two different computers. The jukebox game is incredibly slow to load, way too slow for a 3 year old to tolerate.

I bought this on impulse at a Toys 'R Us in Ottawa while on a care trip, so I may have a Canadian edition. First, the upside: my 3-year-old likes it. The art is nice. The downside: The program is supposed to remember progress from session to session. It doesn't. And the songs included, which were supposed to match the songs in the juke box, were not the same songs and were in Dutch. (I guess someone at Simon & Schuster Interactive grabbed the wrong file when it was time to burn the masterCD-ROM!) The space game is a thinly disguised version of Space Invaders. Even though George is recruited to "collect" shapes from asteroids, my son immediately referred to shooting at the asteriods as "killing" them. And in no time, my son was yelling "Kill, kill, kill!" as he played it. I don't think that was supposed to happen. The puzzle game works, but it is just wooden puzzles as software. The juke box game didn't work too well for my son because he liked to give the "wrong" answers because they were funnier.

I bought this and my 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 boys they love it!!! the puzzles are great, star shooting game of shapes is great for hand eye coordination and the pie game is awesome they are learing letters, matching, size differentation, all the while laughing!

My 3 year old enjoys this game, except for the jukebox thing. The puzzles are fun, with 3 levels of difficulty and some added animation when the puzzle is finished. The fruit catch is a little bit difficult, but a great way to get a feel for using a mouse. I definitely recommend this game!

I just bought this game this afternoon for my four year-old twins. They like it, but it has a few issues that are HIGHLY irritating. For one thing, I wish the initial game-choosing menu was a little more clear. We found the Fruit Catch game by accident. Also, on some games, it uses 100% CPU resources! This is bad, especially on the already hot-running small-form factor machine I have set up for them. And most irritating of all, on many games there is no way to stop and try another when your kid wants to try something else. I've actually had to do a Ctrl+Alt+Delete application termination just to get out, and then I have to start the program all over again to play a different game (another review mentioned this glaring design flaw). No wonder they are no longer making this game! It's packed with problems. However, it is entertaining and my girls seem to like it well enough.

My 4 year old is just learning to use the computer. The games in this software are creative but the navigation is not user friendly. First, it uses only a small square in the center of your screen. You choose a game from the delightful menu but you cannot get out and back to the menu if you want to move on. The games are much too long for my son's attention span and I had to use the task manager to quit the program if when I wanted to leave without finishing the game. I am very new in the kid software realm and could have been missing something but this was much tougher to use than any of the others I've bought.

It feels like the programmers rushed this game to market without putting it through beta testing (the testing where people who act as real players put the game through its paces). The failure to remember game progress and the need to completely exit the game at certain stages are incredibly annoying for both parent and child.