Animal Vegetable Mineral

Copyright : Amsoft | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

The program has been designed to allow a child to "educate" the computer by entering a series of questions and objects. During this sequence a child is encouraged to think about the origins of objects and to learn about the differences between them. The computer responds by thanking the child for teaching it to tell the difference between the objects entered.

Graphics

Bourne Educational Software and Amsoft very rarely used much of the graphical capabilities to present the pretty nice range of educational titles aimed at schools and home computer users to keep the children quiet and help them learn the basics. Sadly Animal Vegetable Mineral completely missed out on the chance to be a much better looking game with some nice little graphics which would have no doubt helped children to learn faster. Instead BES resorted to a coloured text only system, which although it looks ok, is hardly going to get them many points.

Sound

I?ll be honest with you, I didn?t expect this game to have any sound whatsoever when I loaded it into my CPC back in 1988 but was surprised that it did do something of an audible nature, granted it wasn?t gonna make me bop around the bedroom or anything but it did give out some simple sounds. When the computer is trying to guess the animal, vegetable or mineral that you?re thinking of it will make a humming sound to convey the "mmmm..." followed by a nice and kind of rewarding musical sound should it guess correctly or, yes you guessed it, a reverse "mmm" to convey that the computer is sad that it guessed incorrectly.

Gameplay

The idea of the game is for the user to teach the computer how to identify between different animals, vegetables and minerals. By doing so the user is also learning the differences for themselves by entering a series of questions and answers which the computer will then ask you when you next play the game. In reality its a very simple idea but it really does do the trick.

Obviously its not going to win an award for best graphical game or even best sound in a game, but its far from a let down when you really think about it. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is quite a nice game from an eductional point of view, which is exactly what the game is trying to do anyway and quite frankly if you?re trying to have fun on a game like this then you need to get out more.