Jump*Start Advanced - Preschool The Final Say! Gameplay 8.5 Graphics 8.5 Sound 9.0 Value 8.5 Jump*Start Advanced - Preschool  reviewed by Tory Favro Review Date: 22 August 2002 Review Score: 8.5/10  Distributor: Vivendi Universal

Jump*Start Advanced - Preschool is designed to assist parents in teaching their children the basics about letters, numbers and a variety of other essentials. As always there is a wonderful amount of music accompanying the game that will even have parent singing along to their child's game. The name of the game is interactivity and the very nature of the whole jumpstart series reflects that. Almost every item on the screen can be manoeuvred or activated by simply clicking on them. Each will initiate an activity or song that will have your children spellbound for hours on end. Jump * Start Advanced - Preschool features about 50 new skills for your kids including: Uppercase Letters Lowercase Letters Number Recognition Spatial Awareness Counting Quantities Colours Phonics Pre-Reading Rhymes Shapes Sizes Patterns Music Art A really neat part to this particular program is that by typing the name 'teacher' as your login you can monitor up to 99 different students using the software which would make it ideal within a classroom environment in the other games in the series. Another great part to this game was that your child can choose a pet within the game that they can go and check on whenever they wish. By completing tasks and other objectives, they are rewarded with a toy that they can pamper their pet with. As you can see from our third screen shot, we choose the little red bird as our pet and we won a swing from him to play with. The creatures abound with cute animations and the kids really seemed keen to finish more tasks to see what he would do next. The software also provides a sing-along session that highlights the words of the songs as they are sung. This way your child associates letters with sounds and it will help them get a better grasp on the relationship between the two. The graphics in Preschool are bright and guaranteed to delight your child. The creatures that you interact with are interesting and friendly and the thing that I loved was that they all spoke clearly! This definitely poses a problem when dealing with other children's programs

such as the Tellitubbies who in my opinion are very bad examples of children's television. The Jump*Start creatures are just as bright and all well spoken without being patronising to the intended audience. 'Big Words' are explained in a manner that you could not take umbrage at and you might even find kids trying to use those words in their own conversations.

The songs and music in this title are brilliant and are to the point that they could stand alone on their own audio CD. Every tune is well thought out and and memorable. Children will go about their day humming or singing these tunes and so will you!

Jump*Start Preschool is a great addition to the software range and a nice lead in to your child taking on Jump*Start Kindergarten.

As always, the system requirements for this program should be within the means of most parent/budgets. A low end Pentium or Apple G3 is more than adequate to run the program and should make this game accessible for most demographics.