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Looney Tunes Cosmic Capers Animated Jigsaws
 'Insert the CD ya Pesky Varmint' says the brief instructions for getting this title of Looney Tunes jigsaws off the ground. This is followed by quick instructions for start up if you don't have your CD driver on autopilot, as well as an invitation to 'Sign In' and to click on the 'house' icon in the opening screen to begin playing. But that's all folks ... as far as the written documentation is concerned.
Never fear, there is more help from within the game. When the action starts you have access to three drop-down menus, one of which has a help file with all the necessary information. Beside these menus at the top of the screen there is also a caged Tasmanian Devil, click on it and the game interface becomes child-friendly and very simple to use.
Now I have to begin with a warning here, this one might cause riot in the household because everyone is going to want to play. The lure is all the lovable characters from classic Warner Brothers cartoons including Bugs Bunny, Marvin the Martian, Daffy Duck and more. They set the scene for the twenty-five jigsaw images and each time a puzzle is completed they serve up a short, original cartoon segment as a reward for being so clever.
There's room here for older fans and budding new fans as well as there are five difficulty levels for the puzzles ranging from very easy to a tad on the tricky side. For the young ones the puzzle pieces are large and easy to manipulate and they click, thud and slurp together decisively as they lock into place. You can ask for a hint to help with the next placement or have the puzzle solved for you and, if the inset graphic of the original picture is not sufficient, you can display a full-size 'ghost' image as a guide.
All this makes it very playable for young puzzle fans, but what about older kids from eight to one hundred and eight? Well the puzzles get increasingly more complex with smaller and smaller pieces. You can also add some extra zing by enabling the rotation mode so that you need to orient the pieces yourself, or you can choose to have another graphic on the reverse side of the one you're working on so that the pieces become even more mesmerising.
The 'Signing-in' feature at the opening of this package makes it possible for several players to save their positions individually. The sound effects and voices are excellent, but this goes without saying as the cartoons are extracts from the original Warner Brothers versions. There is music throughout and you can turn it off if it gets too insistent and young players can print out a certificate at the completion of each picture. Here I didn't locate a switch to ban printing so if your paper is precious you might need to remember to disconnect the printer :).
Cosmic Capers Animated Jigsaws is very amusing for one and all. Perhaps for the higher levels it would have benefited from some extra 'windows' to sort jigsaw pieces, but the 'art' of jigsaw puzzling is made so easy for busy people and busy households where the 'real thing' is likely to come to grief!
Copyright © Rosemary Young 1998.
All rights reserved.
System requirements:
Pentium 133 MHz processor (or better) Windows 95, 16 MB RAM (32 Recommended) 30MB free temporary disk space, Quad Speed CD-ROM Drive, 16 Bit Windows Compatible Sound Card, 2 MB VRAM, Microsoft Compatible Mouse.
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