Virtual petting ain't so heavy
"Helicop gets the thumbs down and The Magician gets the thumbs up."Son's summings up are brutal. I'd give a thumbs up to both of these, andto Creatures, but a closed fist to the Lovers' Guide.
Helicop - or Helicop Investigates Words and Numbers (u29.99) - is the latest edutainment title for Windows 95 from Glasgow's Landesoftware.
The basic idea is to shoot things with your helicopter and pick up letters or numbers to make a word or a sum, but if you just want to shoot things, you can.
The graphics are very good. Helicop is a bug-eyed helicopter with blue sneakers, and I've seen worse characters in commercial games.The interesting thing on the educational side is that Helicop is open-ended. Instead of trying to match a word you can pick your own, with longer words earning more points. The "freeform numbers" section works in the same way, though as Lander's Bobby Farmer says, "1=1 will get less of a bonus than (10-6)x20+9=89".
The instructions could be improved. It's not obvious that you use the keypad to enter mathematical operators (eg plus and minus etc), except with hindsight, of course. It's also not obvious how you choose between the different types of challenge. But having played Helicop a bit more myself, I think it's worth a thumbs up. Perhaps Son just thinks it's too young for him.
Telstar's The Magician (u29.99 for Windows and Macintosh) is a sort-of-edutainment title, in that it teaches you how to do magic tricks. And it works very well. A professional magician, Keith Fields, shows you each trick, reveals the secret, and then provides step-by-step hints. The digital video doesn't actually fill the screen and the lip-synch isn't always perfect on my Pentium 75, but it's good enough.
The Magician also contains an amusing irony. In his introduction, Fields says: "Never reveal these secrets to anybody, because without secrets, there is no magic." That's good advice, but there'd be no disk if he followed it.
Son really liked this title, and spent a couple of hours exploring it.
Whether he will go back to it and learn some of the tricks remains to be seen, but I'd be happy if I'd bought this one as a Christmas present.
Or at least, I would if Son's machine would run the damn thing. As it happens, The Magician failed to install a new version of Apple's Quicktime (the PC crashed with a parity error) and then failed to run, because it was unable to find an essential file. But don't blame the game: it ran first time on my PC.
Neither Helicop nor Creatures, Warner Interactive's new artificial life program, would run on Son's machine either, for the simple reason that they require Windows 95 and he's still running Windows 3.11. That's why Son hasn't had a chance to play Creatures yet: it takes about 12 hours of gameplay to take a creature through its life cycle, and I just can't spare my PC for that length of time.
Creatures is a fascinating "software toy" and by far the best of its type that I've seen, though that's not saying much when the competition is something like Maxis's El-Fish. In an ideal world, kids could raise Creatures instead of hamsters, gerbils and white rats, which have unfortunate side effects (their cages need cleaning out, they usually escape and chew big holes in expensive items of clothing, and in all too short a time, they die).
Of course, Creatures includes sex and death, which is useful, but it's very tastefully done ... which you can't always say for the rabbits and white rats. And if it's a huge success, perhaps Stephen Grand, the game designer, and the merry programmers at Millennium will come back with a more realistic, humanoid version: a sort of Little Computer People (if anyone else remembers this program, which David Crane wrote for Activision) for the liberated 1990s.
The idea of Creatures having sex was going to provide a natural link to The Lovers' Guide (u24.99), a new 18-rated interactive CD-ROM from Yorkshire International Thomson Multimedia. It's the kind of title that gives this column a real problem: Son is far too young for this sort of thing, and I'm far too old. However, I was saved by the fact that I was unable to gain access to the program: it's "password protected for privacy" but I couldn't find the password anywhere in the packaging. If it was a test, I failed.
Jack Schofield is The Guardian's computer editor.