Treasure World
© 2009 Aspyr Media Inc.
Coming "early July" this innovative Nintendo DS game uses the Nintendo DS's ability to detect Wi-Fi zones and record when you are moving around a town or neighborhood -- providing you don't live in a national park. The more zones you move through, the more treasures you discover. There are over 2000 treasures in the game. The game uses a router's MAC address (the bit of code that every wireless router sends out, like a calling beacon) to create a treasure that is exclusive to that spot. Your town library's WiFi zone might cause a Fairy Doll -- one of the 2000 treasures -- to appear on your DS screen. For instance, you could call a friend who is also playing the game, and they would know that Fairy Dolls can be captured at your town library. Make sense? In other words, this is a game that will get you up and moving around town. Chocolate Bunnies might reside in your local coffee shop. A Mushroom House might be outside your neighbor's house. And so on. Because the DS only detects the signal and doesn't send any information, no security codes are needed. The goal of the game is to collect as many treasures as possible which are saved on the DS card, and can be used to make music, by dropping them onto moving song scapes -- like a moving score of music. This adds a creative twist to the game. If you've made it this far through this review, you're probably getting the idea that this isn't your average kind of activity. We'll look forward to testing it with real kids to see if it makes any sense to them.
$29.99, Nintendo DS
Teaches: collecting, trading, classification, language, reading, music and programming