Colors and Shapes with Hickory

The Good
Colors and Shapes with Hickory is one of those rare oddities I found at the thrift store in early January 2017, while we are having an electrical failure at our house. A couple of days later, I decided to try it out on my iMac G3 running Mac OS 9.2.1. (Well, It's actually a 1995 title, but okay, it works on that particular operating system.)

I know it seems obvious enough that the game was made by Information Technology Design Associates, but other titles featuring Hickory were previously made by Sierra, as there are two titles featuring early reading and math skills. This entry (along with another series for first grade children featuring Monker, with a title called "Science Shop" released in the same year) was one of the first in the second wave of Golden Books' Step Ahead Educational software series. Of course, If it were for the Red and Blue stylized CD designs, I kinda like their packaging effort for their games.

The voice of Hickory in this game is well, spectacular! I didn't think that voice reminded me of my favourite anime character "Sailor Moon", whose voice is done by Terri Hawkes in the 90s dub of the Sailor Moon TV series/anime. Quite a difference between Hickory's voice and Terri's impersonation of Sailor Moon. The activities are easy to understand for preschoolers, especially when they provide a few creativity elements thrown into them.

And I've covered an earlier review on MobyGames about DiAMAR Interactive's "A Colour Clown Comes to Town", which also features colours as the main educational element. Golden Books added a missing element: the Shapes. Nice idea! I wonder if you can play with the shapes on the kaleidoscope which I kinda like making my own designs with, but in a real kaleidoscope, mostly small ones, you could see different pre-made patterns when you try moving the bottom lid and see what happens! Golden Books thought up that idea, and implemented it into the game, but to play around with and creating different patterns using shapes. It's a lot better than a real kaleidoscope.

The Bad
Some of the audio guidance from Hickory is too repetitive, but I've also had a similar idea from LEGO Friends 1999 where the stories were a bunch of repeats. On second thought, the contents of the CD took about 30 MB, because of production costs. I know that CD-ROMs contain 700 MB of data, but they tried to keep it small as they are on a tight budget.

The Bottom Line
Although the repetitive use of Hickory's voice never made it into my top spot, this is a great little game for young children learning about colours and shapes. It is one of the first in a second wave of Step Ahead educational games from Golden Books, and I'm very proud that they did a good job with their production effort!

Highly recommended for any young child who wants to have fun with colours and shapes, aside from the repetitiveness!