Bratz

$24.95, Windows 98/2000/XP (not NT)

Teaches: dancing, music, moving to a beat

CTR Review

This dancing contest, for one or two players, features the funkadelic stylings of the "Bratz" girls -- five animated teen girls with zany clothes and names like Sasha and Meygan. Your goal is to keep up with moving arrows to win points in order to unlock new 18 songs, 35 dance moves, and outfits. Eventually, you can win a dance contest. As you press the keys, one of the Bratz girls dances alongside. Features include five language options (French, German, Italian, English and Spanish), the ability to save progress for different players, and options for two players who can play at the same time (the keyboard provides two sets of controls). The activity is fun and addicting, and leveled well so that it is easy to get started, but it can get very hard. It is also possible to save games. Weaknesses include a confusing menu design and a lack of correlation between the dance moves you put in the computer and the onscreen dancer -- so the dancers move at random. We should note that we had trouble running the program on two older XP computers (the program asks for 256 MB of RAM). It did run fine on Windows 98. The bottom line -- this is a fun dancing program that is worth borrowing, at least.