Remember how I mentioned that interior decoration in the form of choosing and arranging furniture was not my proverbial cup of tea in the game of Restaurant Empire? This Gaming Pathology experiment has reached new lows in emasculating gameplay. Check this out– a minigame that revolves around measuring and cutting drapes:

This comes from today’s game, Cyberchase: Castleblanca Quest, ostensibly based on a PBS-produced educational TV series (and it shows in the opening animations that were poorly transcoded from television source material). This follows the same general formula as countless other educational kids’ games: A series of odd minigames strung together by a tenuous storyline. In this one, our 3 young protagonists visit the town of Castleblanca, a village run by horrid but civil monsters. The 3 kids also have a mutant bird in tow who sounds like he’s voiced by the ever-grating Gilbert Gottfried, but alas, the credits indicate otherwise. And even though the unholy undead are supposed to be the comically frightening aspect of this town, this no-eyed skeleton can’t hold a candle to the unnaturally glassy-eyed stares of these young ones:

Regarding the actual gaming content, there are 8 minigames/puzzles to play through. All have practice modes that are significantly easier than the actual games in the adventure mode. Each game teaches something to do with mathematics or spatial reasoning. Most are a little difficult to wrap one’s head around at first. But after some practice, the purpose usually clicks. For example, in the Monster Dive game, there is a tank with a low volume of water. The scoreboard tells you how much depth is required for the current diver, plus a custom adjustment for that diver. You must do the math to decide the water level and drop more monsters into the tub to displace water and raise the level.

All in all, this was my favorite minigame:

Your task in this Disco Deflector game is to adjust the mirrors so that when you throw the switch, the light beam finds its way to the mirror ball without hitting any of the monsters. Then they can boogie like they were meant to.

I’m still going full speed with the educational games, which is good because I feel that one should never stop learning. I wanted to see what that mischevious monkey Curious George had to teach, and how he would go about it. Somehow, I always feel a little bit of relief when I’m able to solve these kindergarten puzzles, even if I make a few mistakes along the way (as I did today).

The game, as you might be able to guess by now since it’s a common pattern in educational games, is comprised of a series of activities and minigames. The action takes place in a circus and the player chooses from among the activities in the big tent. At least one of the activities takes place outside the big tent and pertains to custodial duty and business discipline. It’s also likely to be the most familiar to gamers since it somewhat resembles a traditional Pac-Man game. It’s called Peanut Pickup:

The setup for this minigame is that the peanut vendors are being sloppy with their merchandise. George and his elephant patrol the grounds and pick up the loose nuts. Further, there is a letter on the big tent. Each vendor is carrying a picture as they walk the circus. Capture the vendor that is carrying a picture whose word starts with the same letter as on the big tent. In the above example, that would be the one toting the box picture. This minigame is actually a marginal departure from the usual Pac-Man paradigm in that, of the moving objects that are also on the board (the metaphorical ghosts), two are the hunters and one is the hunted. At least, you’re dinged for catching up to a vendor whose picture does not match up right.

And so it goes with many of the other five activities. I learned from writing up the MobyGames description that these simple activities seem to take a lot of words to describe precisely. For example, another minigame called Animal Acrobats has 3 animals trot out carrying pictures. Then a banner with a picture slides overhead. You must click on the animal who is carrying the picture whose word rhymes with the word represented by the picture on the banner. Like nail and sail. Or, in another variation, you have to select the animal carrying the picture whose word begins with the same sound as the word whose pictures is represented on the overhead banner. If you get it right, the animal (bear, giraffe, elephant, etc.) jumps on a trampoline and somersaults forward; otherwise, they do a backflip. When you have completed several of these, you get to watch a sequence of the animals perfoming for the big crowd.

When it’s time to exit the game, you are awarded a certificate itemizing your academic performance:

I didn’t print this out, though I had the option. Perhaps I can do better if I tried a little harder.

Today, it rained where I live. I thought it would be apropos to play Madeline’s Rainy Day Activities. I’m going to have to play it eventually, anyway. It seems that I have been hitting the kids’ games pretty diligently recently. I can’t complain. Frankly, they tend to be just fine. Bright, colorful, cheerful, simple. Maybe they just fit my intellect, who knows?. Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome release vs. the seemlingly interminable string of interactive movies I suffered through not long ago.

In this game, as in my real world today, it’s raining. Lively Madeline has a roomful of activities you can choose from. They’re not all unique. In fact, many of them can be classified as fill-in-the-blank customizable stories or coloring activities. The customizable stories take the form of brief stories with several missing nouns and adjectives. You can choose from a list of each for completing the story. For the drawing activities, of which there are four, the player is thrust into a primitive drawing tool and is able to select from among several pictures centered around a particular theme; e.g., for the Masks activity, there are different masks to color. The drawing tool allows the user to paint using 2 different types of brushes and 8 colors. There are also solid fills and various fill patterns to choose from. There is an eraser, a 1-level undo, a picture reset, and an option to print your work.

So, I think you can guess what’s coming:

Another drawing activity is “Finish The Picture”. The pictures in this set focus on unfinished scenes. An obvious one is a large picture canvas hanging in a museum. I call this piece “Purple Dog Sniffing”:

This title needs to demonstrate itself to be — however marginally — a game in order to earn an entry in the prestigious MobyGames database. And, so help me, one of those activities had better not be a sliding tile puzzle game! Fortunately, there are some activities that have clear goals which would technically categorize them as games. One such activity is a selection of connect-the-dot puzzles. This is surprisingly free-form and you can indeed deviate from the pattern. At your own peril, but still. There is a typical memory card game with a curious twist: One card has an animal and its match hidden elsewhere on the table has an audio icon which plays the sound the animal makes.

This was probably my favorite game:

The goal here is to recreate the pattern above on the canvas below using the selection of shapes lined at the bottom. Rotate the shapes as necessary.

Some other features in the overall title: Almost anything can be printed (notice the printer icons on the above screenshots). Further, there are two “Print Activities” hotspots in Madeline’s rooms that allow you to print out a number of offline activities in different categories including games & puzzles, paper dolls, cards & stickers, science, word games, and arts & crafts.

So, I’m not too elitist to admit that I had a fine time exploring these games. This title has two reviews on Amazon.com that were, well, not kind, to say the least. I think this person was expecting entirely too much from dear Madeline:

“This product is HORRIBLE! First of all, there is no goal except to have some “Rainy day fun!” Second of all, the games aren’t that fun anyways. Just some cheesy games such as one where Madeline asks some way too easy fairy tale questions, a puzzle game that dosen’t tell you when you’re finnished, and some make-a-story games that are ethier boring or don’t make sence.”

For my part, I’m just ecstatic that I didn’t see another sliding tile puzzle.