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Computer Times
Editors' Choice Game Postman Pat Special Delivery Service Reviewed by Angie Kibiloski
Postman Pat Special Delivery Service (Retail $19.90) from Compedia is a delightfully fun game for children ages 3-6. Britain’s favorite cheerful mail carrier, Postman Pat, along with his equally famous black and white cat, Jess, brings hours and hours of educational playtime to your computer screen. On his mission to deliver a very special package, Pat also delivers lessons in language, mathematics and reasoning, all with his classic sunny manner. Children will learn letter, number, and color recognition, basic math, memory, and logic skills, with positive reinforcement and rewards for success.
There are 8 different challenges within the game. Each challenge asks you and Pat to help one of his neighbors in need, by solving puzzles or completing tasks. Each challenge has different levels of difficulty, and you can choose which one to start playing on. During your game play, whenever you successfully complete a challenge, Pat gives you positive feedback and lets you know that you are doing well. After playing all the games for the first time, you get rewarded with a cool stamp. Each consecutive time you replay each game, you get another stamp to add to your collection. When you get 3 stamps, all stuck on a collection envelope, the envelope opens and you get a surprise treat. Keep playing and collecting stamps to open more and more envelopes and surprises.
Loading the Flyer finds you sorting and loading packages by catching them and placing them in the correct space on the loading bed. Through progressive levels of difficulty, you must match the number on the package with the number on the spaces. At the easiest level, it is straightforward matching numbers 1 through 10. As it gets harder, the numbers on the sorting spaces will be mixed up, then the numbers on the packages turn into dots like on dominoes. At the hardest levels, the packages are marked with simple addition and subtraction problems, as well as the sorting spaces being out of order. At Repairing the Bridge, you have to drop picture pieces into their proper matching slots to fix the town bridge. The number of pieces increases with each level of difficulty. Another matching challenge is Unloading the Helicopter which is much like a classic memory game. You have to open curtains inside Pat’s helicopter to reveal what they hide. Match the items to the letters they start with until you have found all the pairs and the helicopter is unloaded. As the levels progress, the number of curtains to open increases. When visiting a local farm in The Runaway Farm Animals, you have to help place each farm animal into its assigned corral by connecting the dots on their tags to form numbers. The Hay-Stack Road Block asks you to place bales of hay with letters on them into their correct spaces by matching them by letter and color. For instance, the green letter A would go into the A column and the green row. Mischievous Jess’s Maze has you taking control of Jess the cat, and moving around the maze area, collecting cat food and matching words to the pictures they describe. If that wasn’t enough, you must also avoid running into the roaming dogs and water fountains, both of which Jess is particularly not fond. Finally, the Creativity Center, which appears after you have played all the other challenges once, is a place where you can have fun creating your own beautiful pictures. You can use a variety of frames, background images, letters, numbers, words, and stickers to create imaginative scenes. You get to save them or print them out when you are finished.
Postman Pat Special Delivery Service is such a cute game. The characters are so friendly and the atmosphere of the game is always bright and happy. The challenges are easy enough for the smaller children, yet with the progressive levels, can still keep the older kids entertained. Also, since Postman Pat has been delighting audiences for a quarter century, this game will be a fun little bit of nostalgia for those parents who have fond memories of loving him as children themselves. Fun, positive, educational, and great for the whole family, this game is a very special delivery indeed. You can also check out more fun things to do with Pat and Jess at http://www.postmanpat.com, including Postman Pat videos, games, and activity sheets. You can order Postman Pat Special Delivery Service directly from Compedia, by emailing them at info@compedia-usa.com. System Requirements:
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