Math Missions Grades K-2: The Race to Spectacle City Arcade
Score: 80% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Scholastic Developer: Scholastic Media: CD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Edutainment
Graphics & Sound: Are you looking for a good program to help your child's (or grandchild's) math skills? Then Math Missions is a good, strong series that will give your child a lot of practice, and Math Missions Grades K-2: The Race to Spectacle City Arcade is no exception. The graphics are simple, but effective. The characters and scenery are distinctly cartoon-styled and extremely 2D. Like I said, they get the job done. The music for Math Missions comes in the style of ambient background noise and is basically just something nice so that you don't go completely mad because of constant silence while going through the problems. The voices and sound effects are rather basic and aren't really anything to gawk over.
Gameplay: Spectacle City is in trouble. None of the clerks know how to do even the most basic math, and the mayor of this city has hired you to save the place. Math Missions Grades K-2: The Race to Spectacle City Arcade puts you in the role of a Math Wizard who must travel from shop to shop helping the workers of Spectacle City in whatever way you can. As you refine your counting, addition and subtraction skills, you will earn money to be used in the Spectacle City Arcade. Other skills that will be practiced in K-2 are money, geometry, logic and reasoning, problem solving and much more. To keep track of your earnings, as well as a map of the city and your access to the menus, the Deputy Mayor has given you an A-Pet (it looks like a PDA with ears). The menu system (found in the A-Pet) is easy to navigate and allows you to change the game's difficulty, volume and other basic options.
Difficulty: Math Missions Grades K-2: The Race to Spectacle City Arcade has three levels of difficulty (which can be set at any point in the game), and vary the complexity of the problems. Basically, the better your child is in the different aspects of math (visual, conceptual, problem solving, etc.), the easier the game is for that child.
Game Mechanics: A majority of Math Missions Grades K-2: The Race to Spectacle City Arcade is point and click, though there are several times in the game where you will need to enter in numbers with the keyboard (but this is fairly rare). Math Missions is a good game to help give your child more practice in the basic concepts taught in the first grades of school. This is not a game designed to teach your child how to do math, it is to aid him or her in practicing these skills. So while it is a good game, it shouldn't be considered the be-all-and-end-all of your child's math education.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows Pentium II; 256 MHz or faster; Windows 95/98/2000/Me/XP or later; 64 MB RAM; 175 MB HD Space; 16-bit color; 8X CD-ROM Macintosh iMac 233MHz or faster processor; System 8.6 or later, OS X; 64 MB RAM; 175 MB HD Space; 16-bit color; 24X CD-ROM   Test System: Windows XP Professional Ed., AMD Athlon 600 MHz, 384 MB RAM, 24X CD-ROM, Geforce3 Ti200, DirectX 9.0.
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