The Wiggles are aptly named, and if you have preschool-aged children, I highly recommend checking out the videos, the kids will be laughing and “wiggling” vigorously along! Originally an Australian children’s entertainment group that primarily offered shows on tour, they soon branched out to video and TV, and are now showing on Playhouse Disney in the U.S. as well as Australia. The Wiggles: Wiggle Bay is their first CD-ROM, based on their video Wiggle Bay.
Wiggle Bay offers eight simple activities: tic-tac-toe, jigsaw puzzles, mazes, a musical game, what’s different, a find the clue activity, a simple arcade style “water the plants” game, and three movie clips. The jigsaw puzzles and mazes vary in difficulty, from very easy to harder as players go along. There are only five different mazes and ten different jigsaw puzzles, so there’s not much variety. The mazes are pretty ho-hum, but the puzzles are nicely presented. The “what’s different” activity is fun to play and presents a challenge, but again, the number of puzzles are limited. The watering flowers game is a good idea which entails choosing plants, then watering them in a race against wilting. This game could have been more fun, but there’s only three kinds of flowers to choose from to water – there really should be lots more plants to choose from.
The movie clips are cute, but are played in a small window; this doesn’t really compare with watching the Wiggles on TV.
This collection of preschool activities is a pretty mundane offering. The type of games are bland, as in tic-tac-toe, mazes, and jigsaw puzzles; these in and of themselves are not a bad thing to have in a child’s game as long as they don’t predominate, but unfortunately here, these types of activities are the main ingredients. The mazes, musical game and watering plants activity could all have used a lot more depth to them than what is offered. More open-ended activities which encourage free-play should also have been included, besides the musical game.
I’m not usually one to recommend videos over computer games, as I prefer to see children interacting with their entertainment, but in this case kids will definitely get much more interaction out of dancing and singing along with the videos than by playing this game.
Gameplay: 6
After playing the games a couple of times, kids will have memorized them. There’s not much variety, and not much longevity.
Graphics: 7
The animation is bright and colorful, and the video clips are of good quality.
Sound: 7
The music is nice and cheerful, and evokes the Wiggles fairly well.
Difficulty: Easy
Even for preschoolers, these games are very easy.
Concept: 5
These sort of games have been done to death in children’s software over the years. Of course, just because something’s been done before doesn’t mean it’s bad, I happen to like several city-building games that are very similar to each other, and my daughter always enjoyed the coloring activities in children’s software. However, the presentation here leaves a lot to be desired.
Overall: 6.3
While this game bears the name of the Wiggles, there’s really not much of the Wiggles inside. The four Wiggles are in cartoon form, and are presented as icons mainly. The “what’s different” and jigsaw games showcase the various Wiggle characters, but most of the activities don’t offer the Wiggles in them, besides the video clips activity.
The activities are bland, and nothing really different from what kids can play for free on many online sites, including the official Wiggles site.
