Pantsylvania, the Kingdom of the Fancy Pants

• Tweet
• Pin It

Pantsylvania — Curiously Amazing!

A Review of Pantsylvania, the Kingdom of the Fancy Pants

Jackie and Kristina Wheeler

Welcome to Pantsylvania! The Gigglebone gang will introduce kids to a kooky kingdom of 10 locations and activities including songs, fancy facts, furry tales, poke ‘n prod, and seek ‘n find. Children can visit the Fancy Pants Factory, Pocket Park, Hub of Pantsportation, Chez Cheese, House of Beauty, Kingamajig’s Castle, Pantsylburbia, Symfunny Hall, Kid U, and my daughter’s favorite (to my dismay) Rotten Wrench’s Swamphouse.

In each location, Kingamajig loves to sing songs, like We make the pants, the Whirliest, Curliest Hair, and the King of Yuck. Clyde the Parrot will help kids find numbers, pets, shapes, toys, letters and so on. Monkie-Sue will start a furry tale when children go to a location and select the purple beast. Clicking on characters and objects bring them to life and Monkie-Sue is there to help with hints if needed. Velma, a black-haired, red-lipped pig explores facts about the location. Kristina liked Velma and Bunji the frog best.

Here’s what happened when Kristina visited Chez Cheese. There was a lady sitting at a table ordering food such as bananas. The waiter brought her different things. She didn’t want anything except a banana. Then a caterpillar showed up (Freddy) and sat on her table. He ate a bunch of spaghetti that the waiter brought and the lady didn’t want. And then he got sick after eating the spaghetti. Rotten wrench came in and turned the corn on the cob into corn with huge ears. My question is — What’s the point? Where’s the learning value? And do I really want my child exposed to gross behavior such as spitting chewed up bubblegum into a huge pile?

The same kind of thing happened with House of Beauty. There was a weird chair with hair and a beautician with green hair. Rotten wrench came in and messed up the chair’s hair. There’s no interaction with some of these activities. The child just sits there and watches — it’s almost as bad as bad TV…

When we first started this game, I didn’t like the style of graphics. It’s not your typical computer game for 4-8 year olds. The style of graphics is something similar to Beatle Juice cartoons. But something intrigued Kristina and she starting playing this game.
Over and over and over. She’ll spend hours on it — and I can’t understand why. There’s not a lot of concrete learning going on, but kids do get to explore lots of different activities in the different locations. The animation is slow and jerky so much so that Kristina pounded on the keyboard hoping to make things happen more quickly. There’s a fun variety of voices and accents with the different characters in the Gigglebone gang. And there are some interesting lessons from Velma. Kristina learned about making steel drums and creating music from glasses. But there’s no discovery on the child’s part. No problem-solving or reasoning required. The facts are simply fed to the children and there’s no interaction required for reinforcement of the facts. I found they usually went in one ear and out the other…

Seek ‘n Find helps develop perceptual skills by having children find hidden objects in pictures. Other than the Fancy Facts and Seek ‘n Find I couldn’t find any other educational value in this product. Kristina and I are split on this one — 1 “thumbs up” and 1 “thumbs down.”

School House Scorecard

Product:	Pantsylvania, the Kingdom of the Fancy Pants
Company:	Headbone Interactive, Inc. 1520 Bellevue Avenue Seattle, WA 98122 E-Mail: info@headbone.com Internet: http://headbone.com
Cost:	$39.00

System Requirements:

Macintosh:
68040 processor or better, System 6.0.7 or higher,
8MB RAM, 640×480, 256 color monitor,
double-speed CD-ROM drive.

Windows:
386 processor or better, MS Windows 3.1 or higher,
8MB RAM, 640×480, 256 color monitor,
double-speed CD-ROM drive,
windows compatible sound card and speakers, mouse.

Breakdown:

Ease of Use 4
Learning Value 1
Entertainment Value 3
Graphics 3
Sound 4

Overall Score: