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Product interview with my five-year old son

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 26, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Do you like this?

"Not very much."

Why?

"It doesn't have much stuff in it."

OK, I'll give it three stars.

"No, Papa, one more down."

One more down?

"Only two stars. It isn't much fun."

Did you learn something from it?

"I know what four plus four makes. Eight. Four plus four makes eight."

Do you want me to sell it?

"Yeah, it is not very fun."

disappointing game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I was thrilled to finally see a game for my 3 year old for the ds, but this game ended up being a disappointment. It has 2 drawing programs, but they're both exactly the same, it's just that one lets you choose a picture to have in the background to color. It has a counting game, which my son who usually loves counting and numbers got bored with very quickly because of its repetitive nature. It just shows you several windows with several of a certain picture and you're supposed to choose how many of that picture you see. It comes with a harp playing mode which is fun.

The main thing that it comes with are interactive stories. However those stories are oddly translated from Japanese and not very interactive. On each "page" you have a somewhat animated picture. It's mostly a static picture with one or two parts that you can click on to make them move a little bit. It's not nearly as interactive as some of the children's games we have for the computer. If you can get this game at a deep discount it might be worth it, but not at full price. I recommend getting one of the many wonderful children's games for the computer instead.

Finally, a DS painting game for toddlers!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I've been searching for a decent coloring/drawing program for my 3 year old since she was an 18 month old. She always wanted to play with my DS games but couldn't understand what to do. The one game she liked was the BrainAge mini-game where you get to draw in a little box in B&W. Except it's a random game and is timed.

So, Storybook DS 1 is obviously a port from a game in another language - I assume Japanese. The English is weird, the buttons to go back, next, quit, etc, are oddly shaped and in the wrong places. Also, my kid doesn't read, so icons would have been way more useful.

That said, there are 5 kinds of games:
* coloring book - fun, she likes it, but prefers the coloring with no pre-drawn image
* harp - plays Japanese characters instead of music notes
* counting - in a weird format with no progressive difficulty, and no instructive correction (just "ping" or "eeeeeh"), and then a bunny that does a different movement depending on how well you did out of 4 trials.
* draw and color - her most favorite game, captivating
* stories - characters with Japanese names (cute) and odd English

She is thrilled to have a game just for her and spent a whole bunch of unsupervised time playing while I made dinner. She was able to master the coloring with colors, pen sizes, and the eraser, but needs help to do anything else, including switching games.

All in all, this was a good purchase - I got it used for $13. I suspect Crayola Treasure Adventures might be a better product, but I couldn't tell if there was a game that let you color on a blank "page".

I'm glad that the market has suddenly noticed the little guys trying to play with the DS.

Okay for it's intended audience

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: October 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

As the title indicate, it is an interactive storybook of four separate stories (The Three Little Pigs, Snow Queen, The Bat, Kaguyahime) and a few extras in a DS cart. The (short) stories are around five or so minutes long, narrated with light dramatization.

The upper screen shows the text being spoken while the lower screen displays semi-interactive images (they animate or play a sound effect when clicked on). They are engaging for kids (3-6 years) the first few play throughs but nothing more.

Extras include a simple harp that you can pluck, a coloring book with ten pictures, a count the number of pictures game, and a simple paint program. All the extras are fun for awhile but the inability to save your works ruins half the fun.

A nice game/storybook for it's intended audience, and that's 3-6 year old kids. It's not something that will hold their interest for a long time, but fun while it lasted. Two further volumes are slated to be released soon. Is it worth it's sub-$20 price? Maybe. There are better ways to spend $20 on your kids (ie: a good paper storybook) but there are worse (some toys).

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