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Interactive Book Software Reviews

Disney’s Lion King Animated StoryBook

For Ages 4 to 9


Box Shot

See also the:
Parent's, Teacher's, and Kid's Reviews and the
Summary Rating Table and

the SuperKids Buyers Guide for current market prices of PC and Mac versions.

Reviewed on Pentium PC w/8Mb and 2XCD, and
PowerMac 6100/60 w/8Mb and 2XCD

Disney’s Lion King Animated StoryBook is a beautifully drawn, well scripted package that does an excellent job of recreating the popular movie. The CD version is built around 20 basic screen shots. Each screen has a sentence or two of text at the top, which is read by a narrator while word phrases are highlighted. After the narrator finishes reading the text, the user’s cursor appears as a lion’s footprint, along with two side panels presenting options for user interaction. In approximately one-half of the screens, users have the opportunity to explore the depicted scene, by clicking on the various characters and objects. In one particularly well drawn scene, a sequence of appropriate mouse clicks restores life to the burnt-out remains of the pride lands when Simba defeats his uncle Scar. Other options include asking Zazu, the narrating bird, to re-read the text, and asking the old baboon Rafiki to define some of the words in the text. Three screens also offer optional games: a make Simba pounce on Nala game, a connect the stars to make imaginary constellations exercise, and a grab the crawling bug and feed it to Timon game.

Installation on four different machines was relatively uneventful. The only problem encountered by our testers on PCs occurred due to pilot error, when they failed to set their video drivers to produce 256 colors, rather than 64K or 16.7M. This requirement is noted in the readme file on the CD.

The sound and graphics are remarkably consistent with the Disney movie, with all the characters using recognizable voices. Interestingly, all of our reviewers felt this storybook used less full-motion animation that they expected from Disney.

Overall
The Lion King is a very good animated storybook, and is educationally sound when viewed in that limited context. It is also a potentially useful supplementary reading tool for young pre-readers and beginning readers. For older children, its value is strictly entertainment.


See also the Comparative Rating Table for comparisons with other Interactive Book / Early Reading titles, and the SuperKids Buyer's Guide for the latest prices for Mac and PC versions of Lion King.




Lion King
Animated Story
Ease of Install * * *
Ease of Use * * * *
Manual Utility * * *
Technical Support n/a
Fun Factor * * * *
Educational Value * *
EDITOR'S RATING * * *


See also:
Parent's, Teacher's, and Kid's Reviews and the
Summary Ratings Table

System Requirements> <B> <DL> <DT>PC:</DT> </B> <DD>486/25, 2X CD-ROM, 4MB RAM, 10MB free disk space, SVGA, Windows 3.1, mouse, 16-bit sound card</DD> <BR> <BR> <B> <DT>Mac:</DT> </B> <DD>Performa 550 or better, Quadra, Power Mac; System 7.1 or later, 640x480x256 color video display, 8MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM</DD> <BR><BR> </DL> <CENTER> <HR> <HR> <BR> <!-- 3 Bottom Ads from TOC --> <A HREF=Chevrolet Apple Education ESI
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