- Platform: Windows XP
- Media: CD-ROM
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Product Description
Things in Bizarroville are way more bizarre than ever! Six of the town's leading citizens have vanished into thin air, and all evidence points to Dr Dabble! Use your reading comprehension skills to help Rave rescue the missing people. Follow the trail of letters, journals and clues left behind in the doc's spooky digs. As you search, you'll have to find the main ideas, detect important details and draw conclusions to unravel the mystery! Master Over 20 Essential Skills, Including: Sentence structure, Parts of speech, Grammar, Analogies, Synonyms and antonyms, Finding the main idea, Drawing conclusions, Logical reasoning, Making inferences, Using context clues, Sequencing and ordering. What's Inside: Over 75 unique mystery stories will stimulate your imagination. Three levels of difficulty offer progressive learning challenges. Comprehensive content prepares you for standardized tests. Seven printable mystery stories encourage further reading. Special parent tip section provided by Ricki Linksman, M.Ed, Director of the National Reading Diagnostics Institute.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Unlike many "educational" computer programs, this one is actually fun! You need to read and think carefully to find the clues to rescue the poor citizens who have been turned into appliances by the mad Dr Dabble. Along the way you practice reading skills such as parts of speech, word association and sequencing. If only all lessons were this much fun a lot more kids would beg to go to school.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
I have used Reading Blaster for over ten years with my students, and I still love it. They have a great time learning vocabulary, grammar and all sorts of reading skills. This updated version works great with Vista.
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Fun:
First of all, I would like to stress that plot matters a lot to me. If it doesn't matter so much to your child, you can disregard some of my review.
The game begins with an annoying cutscene where everyone is far too overdramatic. This might be funny to young kids, but I think older kids (like the ones in the AGE RANGE, like me when I first played this) will find it irritating. On the sign-in screen, they make it sound like "play the opening cutscene" is optional, but the options cannot be unchecked unless you check something else, and they forgot to put a "don't play opening cutscene" option. Basically, the option doesn't even work.
As for gameplay, a lot of these activities are fun, especially the puzzle games, the ghost crossing game, and, my personal favorite, a sentence-building game that teaches parts of speech. I'm not much of a judge about educational content, but I do believe this would be a good way for kids to review what they learned, even if it's not very challenging for the upper end of the age range.
One unique part about this game is that, to free the missing guests, you have to find three objects belonging to them. You win an object after each game you win. To find out which three objects belong to each guest, and to find out which two objects are red herrings, you need to find "clues". Clues are certain pieces of paper lying around that you wipe off to find a message. The difficulty of the clues will increase as the game progresses.
But, like I said, certain plot deatils have a big effect for me, which is the reason I only gave the product two stars (Minor spoilers below). As the discription says, the goal is to help a green goblin called Rave rescue six citizens that Dr. Dabble captured. After you rescue them, a news story the citizen wrote will explain just why Dabble hates them so much, as well as what happened to them in the mansion. The first two citizens are victims of a love triangle. Fine. The movie star Rave is obssesing over in the beginning cutscene owned a poodle that irritated the not-so-good doctor. O...Kay. But the reason he wants revenge on a particular coach is because the coach gave him a bad grade in PE. What?!?!
But that's not the worst of it. A librarian named Gorky Barf or something like that was kidnapped because he would torture (sort of) kids who didn't return their library books on time. Ouch. But the mayor Jackie O'Cassidy is the worst by a long shot. Apparently she and Dabble ran against each other for class president, and instead of beating him by fair means, spoiled little Jackie made her mom, who was also the mayor at one point, build a highway through Dabble's bedroom. When I read that, I wished I'd left her as a vaccuum cleaner. That's just evil.
Also, there's this mysterious ghost named Lydia. She's probably the best part of the game, especially since her obituary is one of the 'red herring clues' lying around the library and she has her own laptop. She promises that when you finish the game she'll give you the password to her laptop so you can read her story.
I was excited to read her laptop... until I read it. It's a story of how Lydia drives herself mad hiding from what turns out to be a version of herself, and, quite naturally for the scary story attitude, it ends on a total cliff-hanger, never to be resolved. Very scary, and it doesn't make much sense, either.
(Minor spoilers end here)
So, like I said, if plot isn't a big deal for you, this is a very good game. But if your child has an active imagination (like me), you might want to leave this on the shelf.
The game begins with an annoying cutscene where everyone is far too overdramatic. This might be funny to young kids, but I think older kids (like the ones in the AGE RANGE, like me when I first played this) will find it irritating. On the sign-in screen, they make it sound like "play the opening cutscene" is optional, but the options cannot be unchecked unless you check something else, and they forgot to put a "don't play opening cutscene" option. Basically, the option doesn't even work.
As for gameplay, a lot of these activities are fun, especially the puzzle games, the ghost crossing game, and, my personal favorite, a sentence-building game that teaches parts of speech. I'm not much of a judge about educational content, but I do believe this would be a good way for kids to review what they learned, even if it's not very challenging for the upper end of the age range.
One unique part about this game is that, to free the missing guests, you have to find three objects belonging to them. You win an object after each game you win. To find out which three objects belong to each guest, and to find out which two objects are red herrings, you need to find "clues". Clues are certain pieces of paper lying around that you wipe off to find a message. The difficulty of the clues will increase as the game progresses.
But, like I said, certain plot deatils have a big effect for me, which is the reason I only gave the product two stars (Minor spoilers below). As the discription says, the goal is to help a green goblin called Rave rescue six citizens that Dr. Dabble captured. After you rescue them, a news story the citizen wrote will explain just why Dabble hates them so much, as well as what happened to them in the mansion. The first two citizens are victims of a love triangle. Fine. The movie star Rave is obssesing over in the beginning cutscene owned a poodle that irritated the not-so-good doctor. O...Kay. But the reason he wants revenge on a particular coach is because the coach gave him a bad grade in PE. What?!?!
But that's not the worst of it. A librarian named Gorky Barf or something like that was kidnapped because he would torture (sort of) kids who didn't return their library books on time. Ouch. But the mayor Jackie O'Cassidy is the worst by a long shot. Apparently she and Dabble ran against each other for class president, and instead of beating him by fair means, spoiled little Jackie made her mom, who was also the mayor at one point, build a highway through Dabble's bedroom. When I read that, I wished I'd left her as a vaccuum cleaner. That's just evil.
Also, there's this mysterious ghost named Lydia. She's probably the best part of the game, especially since her obituary is one of the 'red herring clues' lying around the library and she has her own laptop. She promises that when you finish the game she'll give you the password to her laptop so you can read her story.
I was excited to read her laptop... until I read it. It's a story of how Lydia drives herself mad hiding from what turns out to be a version of herself, and, quite naturally for the scary story attitude, it ends on a total cliff-hanger, never to be resolved. Very scary, and it doesn't make much sense, either.
(Minor spoilers end here)
So, like I said, if plot isn't a big deal for you, this is a very good game. But if your child has an active imagination (like me), you might want to leave this on the shelf.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
This was the best game ever!
According to my eight year old this was the best game ever! He loved playing it and it was educational. It was great!
Published 5 months ago by raz
love it!
I bought this game because I had it when I was a kid! It was a very fast delivery and worked great! I was really excited and glad I made this purchase!
Published 6 months ago by McKenzie
Inspiring learning
Unfortunately most children today are over amped on video presentations and seem to crave the excess audio/video that is provided on TV and movies and have a hard time leaving the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by peace warrior
not mac compatible
Even though the Amazon description of the software list that it's mac compatible, it's actually only xp and vista compatible. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Norns
He really doesn't like it...
Purchased this for my 10 year old, but he played it one time and never looked at it again. He did not like it very much. Read more
Published 16 months ago by idaBred
Awesome!!!
I remember playing this game when I was a kid and I absolutely LOVED it!!! I love the fact that it has an actual story line and it's not just mindlessly having you figure out... Read more
Published on July 21, 2009 by Natalie Beck
Great!!!
This game covers most of the basics of language arts...reading comprehension, grammar, spelling..etc. My son loves this game, he actually chooses this over the xbox 360 sometimes!
Published on May 28, 2009 by Crazymomma
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