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| By Brad Cook “Our games don’t teach kids to read or do math,” says Hulabee Entertainment co-founder Ron Gilbert, “they focus on teaching kids to think. We feel that once they know that, they can learn anything they want.” |
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 Dreadly loves a good adventure, so take the voyage into these fantastic games. |
He and fellow Hulabee Entertainment co-founder Shelley Day should know: several years ago, they established Humongous Entertainment, which is currently the third-largest publisher of children’s software, and created such popular characters as Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam. Now they’re going to get kids excited again with their new characters: Ollo, Moop, and Dreadly.
The characters are the stars of Ollo in the Sunny Valley Fair (ages 3-6) and Moop and Dreadly: The Treasure on Bing Bong Island (ages 5-8), the first two titles in a deal with Disney under the Plaid Banana Entertainment logo. Both run in either Mac OS X or Mac OS 9. Day says that the “goal is to build a line of products around these characters. Through our partnership with Disney, we hope to see these characters move into other media, such as books and television.”
Ollo lives in a beautifully colored world.
Who Will Save the County Fair?
Ollo is a little ball of blue clay who expresses a wide range of emotions through his animated eyes. He helped his friend Rose, a raccoon, grow a huge tomato for the Sunny Valley Fair, but it broke off the vine and rolled away. You and your children must help Ollo find the missing tomato and get it to the fair in time.
The story is told in six chapters, each with its own goals that emphasize problem-solving and critical thinking. For example, in the first chapter, Ollo needs to help Lottie keep her balloons from floating out of the back of her truck. He probably has something in the shed behind his house that will do the trick, but where is the key that will unlock the shed? Once the player finds the key, he or she can direct Ollo to check the shed, thus honing critical thinking skills and better understanding cause and effect.
Ollo is ready to help his friends in need.
All the characters and objects in the game were created with clay, photographed with digital cameras, and animated with Power Mac computers. The backgrounds, which look like paper and cardboard, were created in Adobe Photoshop.
“[The clay animation] has a nice ‘real’ look to it,” says Gilbert. “You want to reach out and touch it.”
X Marks the Spot
Meanwhile, Moop and Dreadly have a more traditional two-dimensional look to them, which works just fine since they’re geared toward a slightly older group of children than Ollo’s audience. The cliffhanger endings of the chapters in the game and the over-the-top style of the narrator’s voice are aimed at kids who have watched plenty of cartoons.
In their first adventure, Dreadly has a map that shows the location of buried treasure on Bing Bong Island, and he drags Moop along to help him find it. Of course, the villainous Captain James Trench wants the treasure too and sends his bumbling henchmen to dig it up first.
“Dreadly has a real wit to him,” he adds. “He thinks he’s on top of everything going on, but in reality he’s one step behind. Moop always saves the day, but he’s more than content to let Dreadly believe that Dreadly’s heroism is what did it.”
You can expect detailed and interactive settings
from all of Plaid Bananas titles.
from all of Plaid Bananas titles.
Like Ollo in Sunny Valley Fair, the Moop and Dreadly game features six chapters that emphasize problem-solving and critical thinking. Children must help the two characters find the object they need to complete a task, which will help them find what they need to complete a second task, and so forth. Each screen in the game features plenty of areas that kids can click to see funny animations (the Ollo game offers this too).
Exploring and Experimenting
“Kids like to learn by doing,” Gilbert explains when asked about Hulabee’s approach to learning. “They like to learn by exploring and experimenting. What isn’t fun for kids is rote drilling of facts into their brains.”
Moop and Dreadly’s quest for treasure takes
them aboard a sailing ship.
them aboard a sailing ship.
Luckily, there are no “drill and kill”-style tests in Hulabee’s games. For example, children may be asked to change a series of butterflies to the same color when they click on a bush in the Ollo game, but it’s a fun exercise. And it’s not mandatory to complete it to finish the game.
If you liked these games, check out:
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Meet the stars of these two great kids’ games and their friends and foes.
 
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