This heritage treatment is aparent in Pre-school Adventures with Mickey, and Get Ready for School with Mickey (PC/Mac, CD Rom, Disney Interactive, Pounds 19.99 each), the former for children aged two to four, and the latter for four-to six-year-olds. Both aim to promote learning through play, adjusting automatically to the player's performance by increasing or decreasing the difficulty of the activities.
Pre-school's games rely on number, letter and shape recognition and help learning about size, colours and sequencing. Few two-year-olds could manage these exercises, and, at the upper levels, the brightest four-year-old would be struggling. But there are also open-ended activities: for example, a car dashboard where you can operate the wipers, turn the radio up, and so on.
The open-ended activities have a slightly off-beat quality that intensifies in the second CD, Get Ready for School. The whackiest is Bellboy Shuffle, which encourages lateral thinking.
There is much to recommend here - appealing graphics, good sound and picture quality, ease of use and a few really original ideas. But the drawbacks are an overemphasis on number and letter for the younger ones, limited encouragement for creativity, and the relentlessness of the goal-oriented games. Yes, they adjust smoothly to performance, but they never give a sense of completion - no end of game, no score, no final congratulation.
The up-beat music and voice urge you to keep going; the game is compulsive -could we be looking at yet another educational programme whose real function is keeping the kids quiet for as long as possible? Perish the thought.