Media Macaroni

Today my sweet little girl turns 5, marking the year she’ll be off to Kindergarten. Last year I started a new tradition, interviewing her about her favorite things on her birthday. Though she still likes some of last year’s favorites, it’s interesting to see what’s changed.

Favorite TV Show?

“Superfriends because it’s funny and all the monsters look weird.”

I created a monster when I introduced her to Superfriends. I don’t know if I can watch the Hydronoids episode one more time. This year also marked the obsession with Dinosaur Train and a love of Phineas and Ferb.

Favorite Website?

“Dinosaur Train because there’s a new game and that game is really fun. The one where you get to learn about dinosaurs, it doesn’t only have dinosaurs. It has frogs, turtles, and birds (because birds ARE dinosaurs). One of them has a dinosaur footprint pattern and I like making patterns.”

I just saw that the Dinosaur Train website won a nice award this week at Prix Jeunesse, a children’s TV festival in Germany. It’s good times from DT fans.

Favorite Toy?

“Bat girl because she is the toy I like to play with and the games I play with her are really funny.”

Hmm. Your guess is as good as mine on this one. 5-year-olds are weird.

Favorite Movie?

“Shrek because it’s funny and Shrek makes candles out of ear wax. I like all the Shreks, but I like Shrek 4 the best. My other favorite is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs because of the spaghetti tornado and the talking monkey.”

OK, I may have prompted her here after she answered Shrek, which is our most recent movie adventure. But it’s Cloudy that’s been watched no fewer than 50 times this year, with no end in sight.

Favorite Book?

“Shrek because the princess is so ugly!”

I can’t argue with this one.

Favorite Music?

“Recess Monkey because I like the space elevator one because it has a little talky part at the beginning and it’s funny.”

The Final Funktier is played every night before going to bed. Funny, they were her favorite band last year, too.

Favorite App?

“The dinosaur game because I like making puzzles and it’s match-up puzzle dinosaurs.”

She’d talking about a great little sliding puzzle called DinoMixer.

Favorite Museum?

“The helicopter museum because I like the color green and the helicopter in it is big and green. And it has a carousel with funny creatures in it, and I like watching the creatures go around.”

MOMA takes this category the second year in a row (named the “Helicopter Museum” for the helicopter hanging in the lobby). The carousel Olive’s talking about was part of this year’s mega show, the Tim Burton exhibit.

Favorite video game?

“Mario. I like the racing one because I sometimes win.”

She’s slowly entering into the world of Mario, with Mario Kart and Super Mario. Hooray!

I can’t wait to see what the next year brings! Happy Birthday, Olive!

Parents’ Choice recently announce the latest crop of Small Screen award winners. Among all of the worthy winners, here are my contributing reviews:

Parents’ Choice Silver Honor

Scribblenauts

Few games spark the imagination like Scribblenauts on Nintendo DS. Scribblenauts is a series of short puzzles where the player helps the hero, Maxwell, complete challenges to earn a Starlite. In Puzzle Mode, the challenges are more of the real-world variety, giving characters what they need to complete the task at hand. [Read the full review]

Parents’ Choice Approved

Littlest Pet Shop Friends

Fans of the Littlest Pet Shop toys are sure to get a kick out of this Wii game. The 2D graphic representations are nearly as adorable as their 3D plastic counterparts; their colorful Wii world is perfectly suited to these little critters. [Read the full review]

The Princess and the Frog

The Disney Princess and the Frog Leapster title features a set of games for ages 4 to 7 that star the characters from the movie and focus on some basic skills such as letter recognition, word building, and early math skills. [Read the full review]

Productive Parenting

Productive Parenting is loaded with activities for parents with children up to five-years-old. Every activity features the target age, necessary materials, instructions, and the skills addressed including Language/Pre Reading, Fun with Numbers, and Science Adventures. [Read the full review]

While I love looking through the booths of the mom and pop toysellers at Toy Fair, it’s also interesting to see what the major players are doing. I’ve already given a rundown of what Hasbro is up to, and here are some interesting things coming from other big toy companies.

I’m most excited about Lego board games. Oh, yeah, you heard me. Lego. In the game aisle. This concept works out exactly as I hoped it would: build the board then play the game. Because Lego is master of open-ended play, each game comes with alternate rules and board set-ups to change up the games for different levels of play. There’s even Lego dice that get transformed during gameplay.

Lego and board games is such a natural match, I found myself marveling at the fact that this chocolate-and-peanut-butter combination hasn’t happened sooner. Hasbro is also playing with this idea, with board assemblages of some of their classic board games, but the Lego games (unsurprisingly) seem to have a better building component.

Two companies, VTech and Fisher-Price have come out with eReaders for kids. I haven’t had a chance to play with Fisher-Price’s iXL yet, but I got a hands-on demo of VTech’s Flip. The Flip is a well-designed piece of hardware for kids ages 3-7, with nice resolution on the touch-screen and a keyboard for different types of gameplay. The stories are animated and there are different story-related games to play.

The Flip itself is a reasonable $59.99, but each individual story cartridge is $19.99, which seems a hefty price to pay for a book with games. There will be cheaper downloadable content, which helps. In the past, though, I’ve enjoyed VTech hardware but not the software. If the eBook titles are good, they could warrant the price. If not, I fear there won’t be enough bang for the buck. The Flip titles at launch will include properties like Shrek and Olivia, and there’s only one classic book, The Little Engine that Could. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more of the classic books.

Until I get my hands on Fisher-Price’s iXL, here’s Gizmodo’s review.

VTech also introduced their handheld device, MobiGo. This too has a touch screen, and it also has a flip out qwerty keyboard, like a mini Sidekick. It has the same pricing structure as the Flip, and I carry to this device the same set of reservations as the Flip, though the Shrek game I saw looked pretty fun.

Ultimately, though, it seems like all of these touch-screen toys and readers are filling the time between now and when we can get a second or third-generation iPad into the hands of our kids. The versatility of a platform like that (even at the significantly higher price tag) has the power to blow these smaller toys out of the water. My iPhone remains Olive’s handheld device of choice for now.

Lastly, I previewed Disney’s The World of Cars Online, a virtual world based on a little animated film you might have heard of, Cars. The story in the virtual world picks up where the film left off. Lightning McQueen returns to Radiator Springs to teach other cars how to race. Players get to custom design and name their car avatar and enter the world of Radiator Springs.

Disney was incredibly smart to buy Club Penguin. It’s clear that all of the learning curve of Club Penguin has been applied here. You can find and chat with friends, explore the world, and play mini-games. Much of the content is free to play, but a $5.99/month subscription unlocks extra features. The unlocked car customization is extraordinarily elaborate – a whole game unto itself. I think Pixar fanboys (and girls) will be pleased with this world, doing justice to the story and characters created in the movie. The World of Cars will launch later this year, but if you’re itching to play a non-penguin Disney world right now, Pixie Hollow looks equally well-treated in its own beautiful fairy way.

OK, after this I promise only one or two more posts about Toy Fair. What can I say? I found a lot to talk about this year. There’s also my latest post at Z Recommends about hands-on building and creativity toys.

I can now say with reasonable confidence that all of the Christmas presents have been opened, unpacked, and played with. Here are some of the highlights from Olive’s holiday haul. (Hauliday?)

The biggest boon to Olive’s pretend play was delivered by Santa, the contemporary dollhouse from MOMA. She’s filled her house with the legion of Calico Critters and Littlest Pet Shop pets she also received, and goes wild recreating different family scenarios, usually involving the care of a crying baby (perfect practice for becoming a big sister).

Captain Corndog vs. Baron von Broccoli made us laugh, so our hope was that they’d make Olive laugh, too. For days Olive took the feuding duel with her everywhere.

She also got the Lego Brickmaster Castle set. What’s appealing about this one is that the box and book are all-in-one, so the legos are stored with all the instructions to make a bunch of different castle-themed Lego creations. The builds are all small scale, so they’re a piece of cake to put together, then to deconstruct to make more. Bonus: scythe-weilding skeleton minifig.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned lately how OBSESSED Olive is with Dinosaur Train, and as a result, with dinosaurs in general. To that end, Grandma found her Dinosaur Mountain. Coupled with the handful of other plastic dinosaurs she got, she’s in dinosaur heaven.

Santa also brought Digging for Dinosaurs for her Leapster. Rarely do Leapster cartridges get more than 20 minutes of play at a time, but she was playing this one for an hour at a time on our road trip. It’s a must-have for dinosaur-loving Leapster owners. (Disclosure: this title was made by friends of mine at Scholastic, but Santa did pay cash money for it. Well worth it.)

This is going to warrant it’s own post, but the new Super Mario Bros. Wii was top of my Christmas list, and I was excited to find it under the tree. Even more exciting: playing cooperative mode with my girl as an excellent opportunity to introduce her to the wonderful world of Mario (outside of doing donuts in MarioKart). I’m such a proud mama.

On our recent holiday road trip to the Midwest, Olive was alternately entertained with my iPod, my iPhone, our Nintendo DS, and her Leapster. Sure, we pulled out travel bingo, but that lasted about 10 minutes. It got me thinking about how much has changed for kids in the past decade.

At the dawn of the decade, I was working exclusively on CD-ROMs. It was the heyday of CD-ROMs for kids. Budgets were fat and we even got parties and t-shirts at the end of projects. CD-ROMs dominated little kids’ eyeballs while GameBoy was in the hands of older kids, but that was all about to change. Here’s a look at some big milestones in children’s media of the past decade.

2000

• Dora the Explorer premieres, taking over the torch of “interactive” television from Blues Clues, and launching our Latina friend into super-stardom.
• PS2 was new on the scene, but a lot of producers were too busy playing Grand Theft Auto to worry about how to use it effectively for kids.
• Tivo was just hitting the market, and over the course of a decade a generation of kids becomes confused in those rare moments of watching TV as it’s airing.

2001

• Nintendo gives us Game Cube, with terrific launch titles like Luigi’s Mansion. I remember that game really opening my eyes to different gameplay possibilities. It was but a teaser, though, to the Nintendo revolution to come.
• Nintendo also gives us GameBoy Advance, securing their status in the handheld market.
• Beginning in 2001, Leap Frog starts to dominate the kids’ interactive market when the Leap Pad becomes the best-selling toy. CD-ROM tanking sales follow, and those of us in the CD-ROM biz start looking for new media.
• Baby Einstein is sold to Disney, and the tidal wave of make-your-baby-smarter products follow.
• The first iPod is released. While not immediately part of the world of kids, new iPod releases (video! touch! cheap Shuffles!) follow.

2002

• They Might Be Giants releases their first family album, No!, bringing kids’ music into the consciousness of hipster parents everywhere.
• The surprise hit Scene It! puts interactive DVDs on the map. CD-ROM folks jump all over this wave, creating mediocre interactive products for a couple years. (Really, DVD players really suck as an interactive platform.)

2003

• Leap Frog enters the handheld market with the Leapster. Suddenly handheld games are accessible to littler kids.

2004

• Nintendo releases the superior Nintendo DS. To this day, I wish this could be the do-everything platform for kids. I’m still waiting for more educational games on DS, and it seems like they’re finally starting to trickle in.

2005

• The double-whammy: Webkinz and Club Penguin launch, creating in their wake a frenzy of imitation virtual worlds for kids. Even today you can’t shake a stick at the Internet without hitting a kids’ virtual world.
• Sweet, sweet YouTube. Where would we be without you? Ever since she was a baby on my lap, Olive has been watching clips on YouTube: classic Sesame Street, music videos, funny cats, skateboarding dogs, and rollerblading babies.

2006

• One word: Wii. With a single console, Nintendo gets two-year-olds playing video games with their grandparents. It also seems that finally a console maker is paying attention to women gamers. I love you, Nintendo.

2007

• Yo Gabba Gabba premieres. I should really talk about all of the excellent shows that have premiered over the past decade in the explosion of children’s televisions, but this one remains a favorite.
• Apple gives us the first iPhone. Initially, no one would have thought of this as a children’s platform, but as harried parents handed their phones to their kids to play with koi in a pond an endless stream of kids’ apps have followed.

In the past few years, everyone has been innovating on these platforms, and we can expect more innovation in the decade to come (Apple tablet?). If it comes as quickly, the future will be mind-boggling.

Help me out. What am I missing? What has changed your child’s life in the past decade?

I recently attended a 2K Play event showcasing the newest Nickelodeon video game titles. We were invited to bring kids along to give the games a try, but Olive was out with her grandparents that day. As I played through the new Wii titles, I knew she’d love the new Ni Hao, Kai-lan Super Game Day, a terrific collection of mini-games perfectly suited for preschoolers.

I was right. I received a review copy of the game, and Olive and I had our own super game day today. As with other 2K Play games, your Wii motions don’t have to be precise to be registered, which means your little one has an easy time making things happen on screen. We’re not Ni Hao, Kai-lan watchers, but you don’t need to be to enjoy this game. If you are a fan, though, this will be a blockbuster success in your house.

Olive’s favorite game was Bubble Pop, where you jump on a platform to make bubbles come out, and then you run around and pop them.

I’m a fan of the dancing game, where YeYe does a move and you have to follow the moves, all of which incorporate different movements of the Wii remote.

Many of these are fun as single player games, but I was really taken with how much fun Olive and I had playing together in the two-player versions. It was especially fun when we were in the same dragon boat working together to beat the computer boat. We totally left Kai-lan in our dust. Haha!

It only took an hour to get a sampling of each of the mini-games, but there was no shortage of games that Olive wanted to play over and over. I’m sure this game will bring a lot of super game days to our house.

Another new Wii title worth mentioning is Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom, the latest in a series of games that includes Dora Saves the Snow Princess and Diego Safari Rescue. Like its predecessors, this game is a perfect starter sidescroller. The controls are intuitive, and they don’t really increase in difficulty throughout gameplay.

Even though the games are very similar, Olive likes playing this new one for the variation. If you’ve never played any of them, all are winners.

On Amazon: Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: Super Game Day and Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom

A nice long car ride to Vermont as well as a couple recent subway rides finally gave me the time I needed to finish the new Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box on Nintendo DS. It’s as good, if not better, than Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I know what you’re thinking: “But I saw those TV commercials of women in their 30’s playing it and thinking really hard and the game looked like absolutely no fun at all.” I know. But what the marketing people got wrong, the game designers got right.

Professor Layton and his trusty sidekick, Luke, are back, and now they’re investigating the mysterious death of a professor friend of theirs, who may have opened the Elysian Box, a box that is rumored to bring the instant death of anyone that opens it. Diabolical, huh? The only clue they have to go on is a train ticket on the Molentary Express, and the train is always a wonderful location for a mystery. When the train arrives at the mysterious town of Folsense, the plot thickens with talk of vampires. Though the cut scenes are often ridiculously long, they’re so beautifully animated that it’s hard to care. Also, Professor Layton has gotten considerably more dashing in this version. I’d like to see a movie version where he’s played by a young Harrison Ford.

The puzzles are just as fun as they were in Curious Village. There’s such a nice mix of logic, math, visual, and language puzzles, that there’s a little something there for every kind of thinker. As with the last one, I think tweens and older kids will have lots of fun with it, but the whole family should get in on the action to solve the tough puzzles. What’s hard for one person might be a piece of cake for another. Check out this game trailer, which does a much better job than the TV commercials for showing the beauty and fun of this game.

On Amazon: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

It’s time again for the Parents’ Choice Small Screen Awards. All of the winners can be viewed on the Parents’ Choice Foundation website, and here are the reviews that I contributed for video games and websites worth checking out:

DreamBox Learning K-2 Math

The Dreambox Learning math activities are more than elementary questions and answers. Different math tools guide the child to thoroughly explore the concept and figure out the answer – a far cry form simple rote memorization. The minimal visual design of the math manipulative screens keeps maximum focus on the math tool at hand. [Read full review...]

PBS KIDS Island

PBS KIDS Island is designed for reading practice, from letter recognition to reading words. The island is an amusement park filled with reading games, in which players work on reading skills to earn tickets to get prizes to decorate their tree house and to unlock new rides and games. [Read full review...]

Disney Fairies

Disney Fairies is a delightful collection of early math games for the Leap Frog Leapster. In the games, players are helping Tinkerbell and her fairy friends with various tasks, each of which addresses a different skill. Along the way “lost parts” are found which can be used to repair toys in Tinkerbell’s workshop – a well-conceived motivation for young players. [Read full review...]

Kidzclix.net

Visitors work to build a tower from shaving cream and straws, trying to make it as tall as possible. When young builders believe their structure is sound, they can turn on gravity with a press of the button to see how it holds up. If not, go back and try it again. Some of these activities are hilariously “gross”, like the Household Germ Hunt, where players swab different parts of an absolutely disgusting house to find the places harboring the most germs. [Read full review...]

Star Wars: Jedi Reading

This fun game captures the essence of the original Star Wars trilogy. Perhaps the best example is the game “Asteroid Attack,” where players fly the Millenium Falcon through the asteroid belt, where players blast letters to match sounds and spell words, destroying TIE fighters and asteroids along the way. [Read full review...]

Cozi

Cozi is a free, easy-to-use set of tools to organize your household. One of the main features is a family calendar, which can be color coded for all of the members of your family. The appearance is clean, appointments are easy to set, and there are a variety of printing options. [Read full review...]

Disney/Pixar’s Up

The first thing that you’ll notice about Disney Pixar’s Up for the Leap Frog Leapster is that it’s gorgeous. And if you’ve seen the film, you’ll see that “the look” of the Leapster games has been transformed to a more vintage Disney. [Read full review...]

Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: Beach Day

The most successful of the three activities is “Beach Photos.” Hoho wants to take home a large pail full of objects for the beach, but Kai-lan encourages him to take pictures of the things instead. To take pictures, the player must decide which of the things is not like the others, a standard but sweet sorting game. [Read full review...]

Please go and check out all of the worthy small screen winners.

Precious few things are true family entertainment – as fun for a 7-year-old as for a 67-year-old, and everyone in between. Boom Blox is one of those rare things. The last iteration won me over despite my prejudice against celebrity gaming, and Boom Blox Bash Party only improves on this great game.

The basics of the game have stayed the same – it’s a whole lot of throwing things at things. But there lots of new things to get excited about in Bash Party. I’m not just talking about new worlds, though pirates and outer space are always good fun. New blox in this edition are virus blox, causing a lethal chain reaction through the other blox (a bit like the chemical blox the last time around), push blox that send things flying into the air, and conveyor blox, allowing for all kinds of Rube-Goldberg goodness. 

There’s now a paint ball, letting you color the blox to meet different goals, cannons, and best of all, there’s now a slingshot. It’s not something I’m necessarily proud of, but boy is it fun to hit the characters. Clearly the creators know this, because not only can you grab and sling any of the blox with the slingshot, you can take hold of a character and send the poor little guy hurtling through the air or at a wall of blox. Comic mischief, people. All in good fun. 

The other thing they clearly recognized was the need for more multiplayer options. Boom Blox is fine when playing solo, but it really comes to life in co-op and versus mode.

And , of course, there’s still the level creator. There’s a YouTube channel dedicated to some of the brilliant things people have come up with. 

Boom Blox is a great one for your gaming library, and for the sheer variety, Bash Party is worth a purchase even if you have the original. 

One of the great things about spending time off with my 7-year-old niece is having the opportunity to catch up on all of the recent episodes of Phineas and Ferb. I mean really, what better way is there to spend summer vacation than watching a show about summer vacation? How about playing a game about summer vacation? I dusted off my languishing Gamefly subscription and fired up the Nintendo DS for some Phineas and Ferb summertime fun.

As usual, Phineas and Ferb have big plans, and this time they involve building roller coasters that stretch through the whole town. In each level, Phineas and Ferb gather parts for a ride, as well as general machine parts for fixing things along the way. The two travel as a pair. Phineas can talk to other characters and rummage for parts. Ferb can fix things. Together they can navigate high jumps, ladders, ski lifts, tightropes, and the like. The back and forth of the two characters reminded me quite a bit of Lego Batman. Sometimes it was a little too much switching back and forth between the stylus and keypad for my liking, but overall the exchange was interesting. 

The levels are intensified by a busted meter: Candace is always lurking on the top screen ready to bust her brothers, but give her a piece of cake and she’ll get distracted. There’s something about the omnipresence of Candace as she’s slowly freaking out that makes me really happy. 

Mini games and puzzles are peppered throughout, some pretty good like this spatial puzzle that took some getting used to:

Others, like hammering and welding seemed unbefitting of Ferb’s tremendous skills (and the skills of the player, for that matter). As the game leveled up, though, these mini games got better. 

Fans of the show are sure to like this game. It’s got a lot of the same humor of the show, from Phineas’s quips to gags like roller coaster that takes a tunnel to China before launching into outer space. A whole level is dedicated to the fabulous S’Winter episode (that’s Winter in the Summer for non-watchers), and fans will appreciate that the game leads up to playing as Perry the Platypus’s alter-ego, Agent P.  

And for no other reason than the mere mention of Phineas and Ferb makes me start singing this, I give you S to the I to the M to the P.