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Nine is the Magic Number: Infogrames' New Children's Games

Here’s a closer look at two of the upcoming games with Gano Haine of Stunt Puppy Entertainment, designer and developer of these titles:

Kids

“You can play with several main characters [in Thomas & Friends: Building the New Railroad Line], and you put together a new line for the Island of Sodor,” she says. “Then we have built into the game various events that occur at random, which are a lot like the stories and videos: the oil barrels spill onto the track, a cow wanders onto the track, etc. After you build your track, then your line comes to life, and you can drive around. And along the way, you have these little adventures that pop up. These are the kind of things that are very familiar to Thomas viewers: the track breaking, something’s on the track, a train gets dirty, and more.”

“Dora the Explorer: The Lost City Adventure is a quest to find Dora’s lost teddy bear Osito (bear in Spanish) in the place where all the lost things wind up,” explains Haine. “The game is largely math-based. For example, you’ll help Senor Toucan, who lost his reading glasses and can’t go through the number pyramid, because without his glasses he can’t read the numbers. There’s a Pirate Piggies sequence where you load all the pirate pigs in the boat.”

“Dora is a very adventurous little girl who seems to have the same appeal to little boys as the little girls in this age category, which is very exciting. But what I find really interesting about the Dora games are how they introduce Spanish words in an organic and flexible way. We find with the game that children pick up these Spanish words quite easily,” says Haine.

These games and many of the Infogrames’ children’s titles have multiple difficulty levels, so the game can be played by a three-year-old or a five-year-old, or, in the case of Spy Fox, six- to nine-year-olds.