Didi and
Ditto have advanced from kindergarten to first grade in their second
installment of the grade-based series from Kutoka. This time around, the
wolves have taken over the kingdom and have made the beavers and their friends
practically slaves. However, the wolf king’s weak spot is his pride in the
superior intelligence of wolves, so Didi and Ditto challenge the wolves to a
game of wits to see who is really smarter. If Didi and Ditto win, the wolves
will have to leave the valley. If the wolves win, then either Didi or Ditto
will become the wolf king’s personal slave.
There are 16
activities featured on this program, most of which are fairly well designed.
These activities focus on critical thinking skills, various math skills, word
and letter recognition, measurements and science facts. Some of the activities
are: Which Turtle, a fun variation of Guess Who, where players have to guess
which physical attributes the other player’s turtle has by asking “yes/no”
questions; The King’s Dominoes, a matching/sequencing game using double-sided
dominoes with pictures; A Fragrance for the King, a number recognition and
counting game where players have to follow directions to move back and forth
among numbered perfume bottles; The Dice Game, a version of a type of “shut
the box” game, which demonstrates addition in a dice game of chance; and The
Writing Machine, a game which requires kids to choose letters to spell out
words in short sentences.
Many of
these activities are engaging and creatively designed, like the really cute
Singing Snails, an unusual version of a “match the note” musical activity, and
The Cave Maze, an excellent critical thinking maze where the players have to
move objects around to gain access to different areas, a game which is similar
to a maze activity in The Zoombinis. However, other activities are
badly designed, and suffer from a lack of clear direction. One example is The
Writing Machine, a game that teaches sentence structure. The problem is that
the interface for choosing letters is awkward, and also the directions are
less than clear on the fact that a punctuation symbol is needed to end the
sentence before the activity is considered complete. Another ill-designed game
is Couki’s Wagon, a game of word relationships and rhymes. Kids have to click
on a wagon to drop a word onto a matching cart below, but it is difficult to
time the drop just right to hit the moving cart below, especially the ones two
levels below. If a wrong word is dropped onto a cart, there is no way to
remove it. Players will just have to wait for the time to run out to start the
game over.
Also, even
while the activities are fun and engaging, they’re not as good as they could
be in terms of first-grade curriculum. Much more emphasis should be placed on
phonics in the reading activities.
Because most
of the 16 activities are very good, the few not-so-good ones don’t detract all
that much from the overall quality of the game. However, this grade-based game
has the worst interface I’ve ever seen in a kids’ game. The original Didi &
Ditto Kindergarten also had some interface problems, but instead of the
designers trying to improve the interface, they’ve made it much worse. As in
Didi & Ditto’s Kindergarten, the activities are hidden in each scene
for some unexplainable reason. A kid could spend quite a bit of time trying to
find them. Even when found, it’s hard to remember where they are each time.
The activities are accessible on the main menu screen after they’ve been
completed, but as they’re not named, it’s still unclear how to access a
particular activity.
Many of the
activities require typing, which is hard for a lot of first-graders. The
typing isn’t designed very well, as in the activities that require users to
skip spaces in the letter blanks. Some of the activities will have words that
have some letters in the word, but not all. When typing the missing letters,
the user has to manually “skip over” the letter that’s already there, to be
able to type in the next letter. This should have been automated. And, most
games in this age group use the mouse to choose letters from a grid, which is
easier.
Another
smaller negative is the annoying voice acting in this game. All of the wolves
sound like they’re mentally deficient, as they speak really slowly and
choppily. Also, their voices are nasal and irritating. Didi and Ditto sound
like they have really bad colds. The language is a bit odd, too. The cursor is
called a “pointer”, and one activity has word phrases like “the mother” and
“the grandfather”, which is not really how Americans would speak. They would
say “your mother” or “his grandfather”.
It’s a shame
that this game has these interface problems, as it has some good content.
However, while the activities are good, getting to them is a big problem. Not
only does the interface cause hardship, the long wait times for the spoken
instructions can be a detriment for kids. The speech can be clicked through
with the space bar, however, which I highly recommend. And, the activities
aren’t as educational as they could be, so they don’t really compensate for
the negatives.
I cannot
recommend this game, especially when there are so many other first-grade
software programs like Jumpstart and Reading Rabbit that do a
much better job at keeping kids interested. It’s a shame, as Kutoka has many
good programs that they’ve developed over the last several years, particularly
the Mia series. I hope their next Didi & Ditto title is a big
improvement over this one.
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Gameplay: 5.0
It’s hard to have
fun with this game, which is the point of playing a computer game. The
difficult and awkward interface becomes the focus, instead of the activities.
Kids won’t be learning much if they’re not playing.
Graphics: 8.0
The best feature
of this game are the wonderful graphics. All of Kutoka’s games are visually
appealing, and this one is no exception.
Sound: 5.0
The voices are so
annoying, it’s hard to describe how bad they are.
Difficulty: Medium/Hard
Even the easy
level is not all that easy for first-graders, and the higher levels are quite
challenging. And, the interface makes everything much harder than it should
be.
Concept: 7.0
The concept is
good, with some innovative critical thinking and creative activities. However,
the presentation and execution leaves much to be desired overall.
Overall: 6.0
This was a hard
game to rate on a scale, as the good and bad points were so extreme from each
other. There were some good activities, and some bad ones. The interface was
poorly designed, but the game was pretty. The voices were atrocious, but the
clickable hotspots were very cute. However, the game as a whole isn’t one that
I can recommend to parents, who have many other better games they can acquire
for their first-graders.
