Mia's Reading Adventure: The Search For Grandma's Remedy

Definitely a game you have to help younger kids with. Adventurous and realistic, good graphics, my four year old stayed up way past bedtime to find the remedy so grandma would get better. She is five now and I still have to help her, but, this is a game a child can grow with. Mia the mouse is adorable in this engaging story. Some teaching of reading but more abstract problem solving, detective work, and searching for clues. Good game for a slow paced Sunday afternoon.

My children did not like this product.

the game is awesome I didn't get the box or the instruction booklet though.

This game looks great but lacks direction. You direct Mia to walk from room to room but along the way you are suppose click things. Which things you are suppose to click is not intuitive nor are there really any clues. For example, in one case you are in the attic of a house. There is stuff littered throughout the attic (bats, balls, boxes, toys, etc). Of the 10 things in the room only 2 or 3 actually do anything. In addition of the 2 or 3 things that do do something, only clicking very specific parts of those things do anything. So for example, if you are suppose to click the bat, only clicking one end of the bat results in a reaction. Often times when my daughter needed help, she ended up clicking every square inch of the screen hoping something would happen.The actual challenges aren't bad but there are few and like I said of above can be hard to find.

My daughter played the game and she did enjoy it. She finished it over 3 short sessions, but would lose interest after about 30 minutes. Moving through the screens seems slow and awkward. Sometimes it seemed hard to figure where to go next and I was the one trying to figure it out.The animation was nice and you can increase the difficulty level. But it don't expect it to be very educational. It is a game with some light reading mini-games inserted awkwardly into the game play.If you want better educational software, I would pick up the Jumpstart Advanced games in the red boxes. Those games seem more geared to education and I felt they were worth the money. I would avoid the newer Jumpstart Advanced World games in the gold boxes as they require you to pay a subscription.

I did not think that introduction to the game was going to end. I thought that I may be able to skip it but no luck. Once into the game I believe that my child was enjoying the game and seem to be learning some great skills. Lastly, you have to hit the "F" keys and "Esc" to save and exit the game, not many program make you do that today.Overall, I feel that this was a good purchase and I would have given 5 stars if functionally was better with program.

My boys are 5 and 7 and they can play this at different levels and enjoy it very much!! They have played it and learned from it extensively!

I bought this game in hopes of adding a good repertoire of word play and phonetic computer activities to my child's reading activities. What I got was aimless wandering and a watered down version of an adventure game.Those who say that this game is outstanding are surely misleading the public.My concerns with this game:The introductions are long and there is no way to skip them. The folks who developed this game were so enamored by their own handiwork that there IS an option to view the exceptionally long introduction on its own just in case you would like to watch it over and over again--Nothing to do with reading.If you want to opt out of the storybook adventure part of the game and move from just activity to activity, you may! You will, however, find, to your dismay, that each activity is never a new game. Once you've done it--you've seen it! I was floored. For example: My daughter and I opened the "Scary Spider" activity under the second level, it was a letter scramble theme where you were to choose from seven letters combinations that would form words. When you had successfully made five short words from the scramble, Scary scares the cat. Wonderful! Our letter choices were C, D, I, M, E, and R. Ask me how I remember? When we entered the activity a second, third and fourth time it was the SAME JUMBLE EACH TIME. I can only assume that each level of the activity might have been different, but the idea that the game was so incredibly finite where the opportunity for learning could have been inexhaustible disgusted me thoroughly and I ended our experience right there. Why reveal the other three levels in ten minutes? Such a waste...I also did not like the themes involved with this game. Stereotypes of people with accents got on my nerves. The days of Looney Tunes and the stereotype of "the lazy Mexican" are long over. While those cartoons still exist there are at least disclaimers on the DVDs that promote them to show that these racial and cultural depictions were reflections of attitudes openly prevalent the early forties and fifties. We're supposed to know better today. Worse yet, the activity that is run by the sleepy mouse with the accent confuses children (and adults alike) by rejecting sentences that are syntactically correct. Poor.For these reasons I personally give the game a two. Many of Mia's antics made the children laugh. I must say that the activities are well constructed, yet fail miserably in variety of exploration. To save anyone else the disappointment of thinking they got an award-winning tool to help his/her child along with reading I must display a star of one. Skip this one and save your money so that manufacturers will know that we need better software to help our kids explore the amazing world of phonemes, spelling and sentence structure. Children certainly deserve better.

Didn’t even work on our computer