Dinosaur Activity Center features lush environments, rousing music, and original voices from the movie, recreating and expanding upon the movie experience. Loads of prehistoric fun is in store for children ages 5 and up as they exercise their memory, creativity, logic, arcade, and strategy skills.

Kids are faced with a variety of dinosaur dilemmas in this CD-ROM's 5 multi-level activities, as follows:

• Colossal Fossil Face-Off (pictured at right) pits herbivores against carnivores in this 3-level strategy game that looks almost like a prehistoric game of Chess. Kids are in charge of a team of herbivores, and must protect their nest and retrieve the egg the carnivores have stolen from them. Kids arm their brood with comets and shields, and whenever they win a game, they earn one of 20 Dinosaur Fact Cards. These can be printed and/or saved to be sent as an attachment via email.
• Line O'Dinos Puzzle Maker allows kids to design their own dinosaur selecting different body parts and backgrounds, creating a custom roar for their creation, and selecting words that will be used in a silly story about the dino creation! After designing a dino, it is given a silly name (like Gorgeousaurus), and becomes a puzzle that can be pieced together at any of 3 levels of difficulty. Once the puzzle is complete, kids watch it come to life complete with custom roars and silly narration.
• Kids need to break through a wall of rocks to free Aladar and his friends from a closely guarded cave in the 100-level arcade game Styracosaurus Spelunker. Players direct a bouncing rock using arrow keys on the keyboard, and each time it knocks into a rock barrier, the number value on the face of the stone changes. Players need to line up 3 or more like-valued rocks in order to clear them.
• Lemur Love Match is a game of memory and speed that requires players to match the beautiful flower pairs as quickly as they can. Once each screen is complete, a new lemur love match is made!
• In the turn-based activity Iquanodon Pond-a-Thon, kids play against Kron or a friend attempting to form more squares (water holes) on a grid of dots than their opponent, one line at a time.

This multi-level activity center is excellent, with a little something for everyone. Kid testers ages 6, 8, and 9 all found a lot to do. The puzzle-maker activity is multi-layered and great fun! Kids (especially the 6 year old) thoroughly enjoyed every delightful step of this activity. Unique and exciting was the ability to record her own roars and customize the pre-recorded roars via a slider that slowed down and sped up the recordings. Silly names and hilarious stories are generated for each creation. Kids select or record 3 words to be used in the "history" of their dinosaur, and the results are ridiculous. Colossal Face-Off and Styracosaurus Spelunker were favorites of the older testers -- these strategy/arcade activities kept them busy for hours.

Technically Speaking
Minimum requirements are Windows 95/98, a Pentium 166 processor, 32 Mb RAM, and 8X CD ROM. Mac users require an iMac or G3 processor 233, with 32 Mb RAM, System 8.1-9.0, and at least 8X CD ROM. This title requires 50 Mb of free hard disk space. A microphone is optional.

Skills Covered
Logic, memory, strategy, creativity, arcade skills.

Educational Value
Kids will exercise their strategy, memory, and logic skills. There is a nice mix of activities and a variety of gameplay formats. Some dinosaur facts are presented in the Dinosaur Fact Cards.

Entertainment Value
This title's range of activities, excellent graphics, and rich soundtrack all combine to provide great ambiance and an entertaining and absorbing experience.

Design
A very easy-to-use program with an intelligent design. Players can use the spacebar to skip through audio instructions and animations, though they may not want to!

Replayability
Hundreds of levels and immersive gameplay ensure above-average replay value.

Dollar Value
This CD-ROM sells at $40 Cdn/$30 US.