Didi & Ditto -- First Grade: The Wolf King
Ages: Kids 5+

This is the second edutainment title from Kutoka -- the first was for Kindergarten. I am amazed at how much teaching/learning goes on in the first grade. The game presents a wide variety of educational exposures in bright colorful graphics. The game rational is that either Didi (female) or Ditto (the other) decide to take on the oppressive Wolf King by beating the wolves at their games.

There are basically four areas: math, reading, logical thinking, and creativity that are explored in 16 activities. So you have word recognition, musical notation, color mixing, shape identification, tangrams, map reading, simple adding and subtracting, use of maps spelling, and a little bit of typing. Levels of difficulty are accomplished with longer words and puzzles. More care should have been given to the voice acting. One character sounds like she has a cold, one did not enunciate clearly the difference between t and c and the rest had high edgy voices. Pleeeze!

In teacher mode you can either play the game or just the activities. A color guide on the disk describes each section with the skills that are addressed. The activities are inventive and very unforced which makes for a good learning environment which leads to a problem. The instructions should have had an easy way of being repeated as is done in many action-adventure games. Especially since some of the activities involve more than simple single steps. To repeat instructions you must hit the back button and restart the character's dialogue or select option to return to the game. Kids are not going to do this. A hybrid disk makes the game available to both PC and Mac users.

Reviewed by: Editor - 12/05