Popeye and the Quest for the Wolly Mammoth

Copyright: KBkids.com

Brilliant Digital now offers a line of interactive, "choose your own path" movies for your family PC. Popeye and the Quest for the Woolly Mammoth is an interactive movie for children ages 3-8. Although the idea is good, in this case the graphics and story line fall far short of perfection.

Popeye and the Woolly Mammoth tells the story of Popeye, Olive Oyl, Brutus and Sweet Pea. The group is in search of the remains of a Woolly Mammoth, in hopes of earning a million dollar reward. Of course Popeye needs his spinach for strength, Sweet Pea is in constant danger, and Brutus is his usual gruff self. The characters are fairly true to form in this story. Sweet Peas voice and phony baby-talk becomes annoying, but young kids don't seem to notice. You may cringe at scenes of danger where Sweet Pea crawls into traffic, Popeye starts a fire with gasoline, and others are in constant peril. The fire scene is particularly disturbing for parents trying to teach fire safety The fire blows up, melting underground ice caves which then releases a baby Mammoth. Sweet Pea, while exploring a dangerous cave finds the baby. He then sets out to save the parents for the now tearful Mammoth tike.

Every once in awhile, your children will tell the movie what choice to make by clicking on a picture which is flashed on the screen. There are approximately a half dozen choices throughout the cartoon length video. Although you can end up with several slightly different endings, the story remains rather predictable. Most of the selections merely change that scene. The story then seems to head back to the same track. Although four, five and six year olds find Popeye fun, and in general liked the multipath movie idea, there are not enough choices, and the choices do not change the story enough.

The problem with the graphics is that the 3D effects have major problems. The frame rate is exceptionally slow, making for rather choppy graphics, even on a very good system with 3D accelerator. At times you can see through the graphics, or they overlap in very odd ways. At one point, the Mammoth baby appears to be doing much more than sniffing Olive Oyl! Even testers as young as five and six noticed how funny this one looked, and teens were in hysterics! Pieces of graphics disappear into scenery behind, and in general is of low quality. In one particular case, the program caused freezes every time the program ended.

Bottom Line: A nice idea which needs fine tuning graphically and in needs more story variation. Wait for this idea to mature.

Ratings: (based on KBkids.com's 4 star rating system)

Overall: 2

FunFactor: 2

BrainGain: 1 1/2

EasePlease: 3

This program is very hard to find, but I found it at:

http://www.shoplet.com/cdrom/db/66413.html