Children's Games Roundup: Mazoocard, Toy Xylophone, and Simon Cow

Anyone who has small kids knows that they are fascinated by both phones and videogames. Handing off a phone to your child while in the car or at a eatery can be a great mode to go on the piddling one occupied. Indie developer Ganlok Studios has produced three fine kids' games for Windows Phones: Mazoocard, Toy Xylophone, and Simon Cow. Each title offers make clean, attractive graphics, elementary gameplay, and a great user interface.

Caput past the break for our total three-game review.

Mazoo Carte

Mazoocard gameplay

Mazoocard is probably Ganlok'due south most fleshed-out title. It is an animal-themed memory card game. Y'all know how information technology works: flip over 2 cards and promise for a lucifer. If they don't match, try to call up what they were and then pick a new card to see if it matches the ones you've seen before.

Mazoocard excels mainly due to its copious gear up of options. Earlier playing, players can switch between five different sets of options by tapping the menu names at the top of the screen.

Cards: The default starting screen. Choose to play with 9 different quantities of cards, from vi (easiest) to 48 (hardest).
Players: Mazoocard supports head-to-head play on a single device. Players are instructed to turn the phone to mural manner, with each person playing from opposite ends of the phone. Play alternates from one gamer to another. If a match is fabricated, the player gets another try; if not, the other person gets a plough. This is a great way to enjoy the game with your child or friends.
Foreground: Select from 4 sets of cards: animals, numbers, colors, and letters. The beautiful animal art is the default, and I like information technology best.
Groundwork: Choose from six colorful wallpapers.
Settings: Hither you can permit players to preview all the cards for 3, v, or seven seconds at the beginning of the game; peek at cards for 2, 4, or 6 seconds during multiplayer turns, or toggle sound effects on or off. Unfortunately the game has no music, but I dubiousness kids will mind.

Mazoocard options

Mazoocard has everything y'all could want in a memory card game. While there are several other games of this type on the Marketplace, Mazoo's options and art style outdo the competition.

Rating: 8.

Toy Xylophone

Toy Xylophone

Toy Xylophone is classified as a game, but information technology'south really more of a musical learning tool. Real xylophones are percussion instruments consisting of a row of wooden bars, also known as keys. Ganlok'south xylophone divides its 15 keys into two rows so that each key is large and piece of cake to tap. It sounds realistic and supports multi-bear upon – it's piece of cake to striking two keys simultaneously just every bit one would on a real instrument. Players can toggle between colored keys or a uniform wooden appearance by tapping the gear icon at the meridian of the screen.

The feature that really gives Toy Xylophone some staying power is its Song Book. Press the music annotation icon at the top of the screen and a list of 72 songs pops up. The list includes many childhood favorites such every bit ABC, If You're Happy and You Know it, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and fifty-fifty the Elmo Song. Songs that originate from other countries similar Twenty-four hour period-O (Jamaica) and Momotaro (Japan) are clearly differentiated by their countries' flags. Select a song and it plays on the in-game xylophone, each central highlighting equally it'southward struck.

Toy Xylophone song book

Simply listening to each song is fun enough, just Toy Xylophone has a few learning tools too. A tempo slider makes it easy to see just what notes a song contains as information technology plays out. The Mute button cancels the automatic sounds as a song plays out. Simply striking the keys however produces notes, so users can play along as the keys lite upward and merely hear the ones they're hitting.

Toy Xylophone is a great app for young music fans and fifty-fifty adults with a casual interest in the instrument. A few additions would increment the app's appeal to the older crowd, such as an Advanced menu in which users could tape their own songs, plus additional playback options for the Vocal Book like Echo and Continuous Play. Thankfully the recording option is planned for a future update.

Rating: 8.5.

Simon Cow

Just every bit Mazoocard is based on the carte du jour game Memory, Simon Cow draws inspiration from the electronic game Simon. A group of colors (or animals in this case) grade a circle on the screen. A sequence of colors plays out which the player must then repeat. The sequence starts with a single colour but adds an boosted step each plow, until finally the histrion makes a mistake and the game ends.

Simon Cow crams a bunch of options onto a single screen before the game begins:

Number: Select from 3, 4 (default), 5, half dozen, or 8 different colors to keep rails of during play.
Sounds: Animal sounds, chimes, or no sounds
Play rotation: This option adds some challenge by rotating the bicycle of colors prior to the start of each sequence. The sequence itself is unaffected, just the rotation serves equally a distraction.
Answer timer: Equally y'all might expect, this limits the amount of time the player has to repeat the original sequence.
New sequence: If yous really want to make the game hard, try having it offset a new sequence every plough instead of building one long sequence.
No animals: By default, each colored circumvolve has an animal face up on it. Plough them off to play with transparent colored circles instead.
High scores: This game keeps a local score lath. It even tracks what options scores were achieved nether - is a nice touch on.

Simon Cow high scores

I didn't enjoy Simon Cow every bit much as Ganlok's other titles mainly because I've never liked Simon. I don't just mean people named Simon (jerks, all of them), only the game itself. Even every bit a kid, I would rather have received socks as a gift than the electronic Simon game. But there are surely people out at that place who don't feel the same style, and they would probably go a kick out of the options this version throws into the mix. My other complaint is Simon Cow'southward art style – the animals are kind of ugly. Perhaps the programmer should swap them out with Mazoocard'due south animal drawings instead.

Rating: half-dozen.

Overall Impression

Each of Ganlok'south games is likely to be a hit with kids. They all focus on a single thing – memory cards, xylophone music, and Simon says – and do it actually well. My preschool-historic period daughter likes Mazoocard the best and Simon Cow the least, mirroring my own tastes exactly. Parents are also spring to dear the games' prices: Mazoocard has both a total paid version and a slightly trimmed-down but free Lite version; Toy Xylophone both come in Paid and advertising-supported Gratis versions; and Simon Moo-cow is simply free.

Mazoocard comes in $.99 and free varieties. Grab the full version hither or the Low-cal version here (Zune links) on the Market place.
Toy Xylophone also costs $.99 or goose egg cents, depending on which version you purchase. You can find the paid version here and the free version here.
Simon Cow is complimentary – pick it up for the kids right hither.

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