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This adventure game features Izzy, the official mascot of the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics. It teaches about the history of the Olympics by casting kids as Izzy, a creature of unidentifiable species who must explore the five rings of his world and find as many hidden medals as he can. With each medal comes a bit of information about Olympics past, so by the end (in theory), kids have learned a lot. In practice, they probably won’t play the game long enough to accumulate much knowledge. Besides the obvious turn-offs – like the fact that Izzy and every other creature in sight looks like an amoeba – there are more basic problems. The “game” device of the program, for example, goes as follows: as you search rooms you find bronze, silver, and gold medals. You may choose to not pick up lesser-valued medals so that you’ll be able to get the better ones later. The risk you run is that you’ll bump into the bad guy, at which point the game abruptly ends. It is a less-than-captivating contest, like any game that can be lost through sheer bad luck. The information about the Olympics is presented, on the whole, as brief blurbs of text, neither very educational nor very entertaining. The high point of the program is a virtual gallery of Olympic posters from the past century. |
