Playhouse Disney Rolie Polie Olie: The Search for Spot

$19.99, Win 95/98/ME, Mac

Teaches: early learning skills, matching, classification

CTR Review

Are you familiar with the Disney Channel's adorable Rolie Polie Olie, who lives with his family in a world of animated objects? The computer renditions of the pleasant little family will immediately draw in young Rolie Polie fans, but design problems are likely to interfere with the experience. Here's the story. Spot, Olie's dog, has made a big mess in the automated household by knocking down objects. To restore order and ultimately give messy Spot a bath, children help by pushing furniture back into place and by playing clunky, but entertaining logic games. Kids catch runaway crayons by matching colors, or slide shapes onto a blueprint to make pictures of rocketships, toys and treehouses. They make musical recordings using Rolie Polie background music and canister accompaniments, and search for bathroom objects that have fallen into the bath water. The narration, graphics, theme and concepts presented are all strong, but the program has some significant weaknesses, including lack of responsiveness to children's clicks and limited novelty. Toddler and preschooler testers lost interest due to long transitions, too much instruction and reinforcement overkill. The same pieces of furniture are knocked down with each play, and the activities never change. While three of the activities are fairly well-designed, the bath water game makes it too awkward for children to zap the target objects. Our Rolie Polie fans played just once or twice before they lost interest.