Richard Boulton's charming story booklet sets up four games with the Mr Men. Even a very young child can play, since no reading or writing is involved. It's good practice with the ideas of left and right, which even many adults find troublesome. In the first, Mr Greedy has to be directed to a luscious ice-cream hiding in a corner of the room. Only the cursor keys are needed, and colour-coded stickers of Mr Clever pointing various ways are provided (though I don't know how long they would last - presumably you'd be taking them off to use the computer for other jobs). Mr Clever's colours match the colours of the walls on screen (not much help on a monochrome monitor, but not essential.) Mr Greedy does not stop with one ice-crcam, but they become harder to get: more and more walls appear in the room and he has to be navigated round them. The booklet doesn't tell you to reset the computer (Control-Shift-Escape all together) before you can load the following program without a 'memory full* error. Mr Silly is being sensible in the second program and has gone shopping for a hat. He says (pictorially) the style and colour he wants to try on. Cursor keys move a marker along the shelves and the Copy key -with a Mr Clever sticker - selects. What silly thing does he do when he tries on the next hat? The third program was my favourite -1 especially identified with Mr Forgetful who tidies things up into good places and then can't remember where. Mr F has installed a dozen wardrobes in his room: six along one wall, six facing. He puts a left shoe in a left-hand wardrobe and the right shoe in a wardrobe on the other side. How organized! He does the same with socks, boots, mittens, skates and slippers. But oh, no, what is where? He must go back and forth across the room (by means of the cursor keys), looking inside wardrobes. The trouble is that they stay open only if he finds two things to match. He somehow has to remember where he saw the first sock when he finds a second. Everything has muddled itself into new wardrobes if you play the game again. A variation on the game puts alphabet letters instead of clothing in the wardrobes. An adult can specify a subset of letters and make it fun for a child to learn a few at a time. In all these Mr Men games, various keys allow restarting the game, turning sound on and off (the tunes are hardly symphonic) or changing the background colour. A nuisance in the packaging is that the booklet does not fit inside with the cassette. It has to be removed from the outer plastic sleeve - rather awkward. Loading and playing instructions seem to be missing until you think of removing the outer jacket and reading the back of it. The cassette is labelled 'CPC464' although the outer package says Tor use on Amstrad* without specifying. It would not load it on our 6128; we did not have a tape-decked 664 to try it on. AA#14 |