The Busy World of Richard Scarry's Busytown (for 3- to 7-year-olds) from Novotrade has great graphics, but that's about all. The first screen contains a cartoon town scene, from which you can visit eleven different "playgrounds," including a deli, a ship, a delivery truck, a hospital, and a park with a gorilla.
The concept is nice, but the implementation has bypassed most of the challenge and opportunities for skill-building. The activities mostly involve moving the character to a flashing star with the mouse. It takes an appreciable amount of time getting from screen to screen, and the movement of the characters was jerky on our 386SX. My mouse-proficient children (4 and 6) had trouble controlling the overly sensitive mouse cursor.
It takes more than 12 Mbytes to load this program. Another 2 Mbytes are required to load the inane and repetitive music. Luckily, there's an option to control the volume. We turned the music off at the earliest opportunity.
Busytown: US$59.95. Paramount Interactive: +1 (317) 843 5111
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