Producer: Mirrorsoft
Retail Price: £8.95
Age Range: 4-8 years

Young children fond of Roger Hargreaves' Mr Men characters will love the four programs in this package. The colourful booklet which accompanies the software tells the story of each game and explains what to do. Mr Greedy's Ice-cream Hunt helps the child with the concept of direction as Mr Greedy is moved round five carefully graded screens in search of ice-creams, while Mr Silly's Hat Game was specially written to develop left/right scanning in preparation for learning to read.

Shape recognition is covered in Mr Forgetful's Wardrobe Game where the child has to match up pairs of familiar objects such as shoes and socks, and the last game, Mr Forgetful's Letter Game extends this to letter recognition when a random selection of letters of the alphabet takes the place of the objects. This game also gives the adult the option of entering a chosen range of letters to suit the needs of the individual child.

The games are extremely easy for even the youngest child to operate as a colour-coded overlay featuring Mr Clever is supplied. This sits over the keys 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0. Unfortunately it is very easy for a child to press BREAK inadvertently if a Spectrum Plus is used, and this crashes the program.

COMMENTS

Control keys: a colour-coded overlay sitting on top of six number keys makes the commands easy to input
Keyboard play: very fast
Graphics: clear and appealing for the young child
Use of colour: eye-catching