Serious fun - Software Review - educational and family entertainment software - MECC's My Own Stories; Edmark's Bailey's Book House; Microsoft Corp.'s Dinosaurs CD-ROM; Humongous Entertainment's Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise; Broderbund Software's Kid Cuts; Bright Star Technology's Beginning Reading; Amtex's Eight Ball Deluxe; Interplay's The Lost Vikings; LucasArt Entertainment Co.'s Day of the Tentacle - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1993 by Steve Morgenstern, Robi Zocher, Steve Holzinger, Carol Otto, Juline Lambert, Genevieve Kazdin

Like many families during the holiday season, the Morgenstems deck the keyboard with tinsel, balance a menorah on the top of the monitor, and look for some cheerful diversions to install on the hard drive. This year, with the help of a team of expert reviewers, we've assembled a particularly family-friendly group of entertainment and educational programs for your consideration. Actually, we see family friendly as a key trend of the past year. Until recently, computer gaming largely consisted of testosterone-intensive software: lots of hacking and slashing, sports games, and flight simulators. But computers have become a family asset instead of dad or junior's hobby, and the software industry has responded with programs geared toward every age level and interest. Better still, many of my favorites this year are suitable for the whole family to enjoy together.

Educational programs like Bailey's Book House and Kid Cuts are so entertaining and creativity inspiring that grown-ups will have a terrible time keeping their fingers off the keyboard. In addition, the joys of digitized voices, musical sound-tracks, and TV-quality graphics on multimedia-capable computers are irresistible no matter how old you are. In our house, my nine-year-old daughter wouldn't budge from the room while my son and I explored the beautifully animated, ingeniously written Day of the Tentacle game. And as I sit downstairs writing this, she's upstairs playing the game herself.

So shut down your spreadsheet program, close the word processing window, sit back, and have some year-end fun with a talking jack-in-the-box, three Vikings who got lost in space, and some of the best-looking dinosaurs seen on any screen.

EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE

My Own Stories

Rating: *** 1/2

MECC, (612) 569-1500, (800) 685-6322; $50

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: IMB 386 PC or higher; hard-disk drive; VGA or SVGA; DOS 5.0 or higher; mouse; sound card recommended.

The title page, with a pretty pink-hearts-and-flowers border, says, "The Cat That Ate the Television by Jessica Morgenstern." Turn to page one and there's a beautiful color picture of a girl and her pet cat in a flower-filled garden. And the story begins, "One day a girl was reaching for her cat and found that it was holding its tummy .... " And we're off on a surrealistic quest to cure the cat--visiting the veterinarian, the beach, neighborhood streets...it's great! The fact that this is my daughter's work only partly explains my enthusiasm. What's terrific is that the program let her construct this illustrated book after only about 15 minutes of instructions on using the software and hours of dedication that she cheerfully devoted to the project.

My Own Stories is a kid's story construction kit. It provides more than 500 images of people, pets, and stuff, 500-plus scenery combinations, 41 sound effects, 13 songs, 11 page borders, five type styles--a veritable cornucopia of inspiration. The mouse-based program interface lets kids choose graphic elements with a point and a click, then fiddle with their color, size, and position to their hearts' content. The text can be written in plain or fancy fonts to suit the author's mood. If the budding writer isn't sure how to spell the name of an object he or she has placed on the page, there's a convenient spell command that inserts the proper letters into the text. Inviting the folks over to the computer to see a story unfold in full color with sound effects and music is great fun. But for more traditional paper-based output, a child can always choose to print out a copy (teachers have been known to be dazzled by such initiative). Two minor flaws should be noted. If the young author writes too much for the text panel, the program makes it a bit too easy to add a new, text-only page to hold the overflow--my daughter, Jess, was understandably confused when this happened. Also, although the program supports a wide variety of printers, it won't work with Post-Script printers at all.

But these are quibbles. Any program that leads my daughter to all but plead for permission to use a piece of unabashedly educational software is okay with me.

Bailey's Book House

Rating: ****

Edmark, (206) 556-8484; $50

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 640K 286 PC or higher; hard-disk drive; VGA or EGA; mouse; sound card; printer recommended. Also available for the Macintosh.

According to me, Bailey's Book House is a great new teacher-developed children's program from Edmark. According to my four-year-old, it's "way cool."

Within five separate activity areas, whimsical characters and graphics engage children six years or younger in a process of play, creativity, and discovery. In the Make-a-Story section, children choose the characters and plot to author their own picture books. The Read-a-Rhyme activity uses silly, animated rhymes ("Rub-a-dub-dub, three kids in a shrub!") to help children enjoy poetry and to increase their vocabulary. In the Edmo & Houdini activity, a cartoon clown and dog teach the meaning of words like behind, off, and under by demonstrating them according to the child's instructions in a series of humorous settings. For the youngest kids in the house, there's the Letter Machine section, with a personable typewriter that pronounces the letters and illustrates them with genuinely funny animation.