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Mia's Language Adventure: The Kidnap Caper
 Aimed at children between 6 and 10, The Kidnap Caper is a gentle adventure with the added extra of learning some French or Spanish. Whilst you won't become fluent, you may well learn a little (I even learnt how to sing "Twinkle Twinkle" in French), and the vocabulary games are designed in such a way that they are quite good fun in any event.
Mia is a mouse, and quite an award-winning mouse by all accounts. Four separate edutainment titles for children, covering maths, science, reading and languages, have won over 70 awards. Kutoka hails from Canada, and aims to make high quality entertaining products that use the strengths of interactive entertainment to educate children. If the awards are anything to go by it seems to be hitting the mark.
In The Kidnap Caper, Mia must find out what has happened to Grandma Mimi, and asks you for your help. She will periodically talk directly to the player, an attribute I found engaging as well as being a means of drawing the player further into the game. She will also provide plenty of help about what to do and where to go.
At the start of the game you choose whether you wish to learn French or Spanish, and you choose the difficulty levels for the tasks you have to complete. It wasn't clear to me whether it was setting the language levels, or simply the complexity of the in-game tasks. Whichever it was, the biggest challenge was, not surprisingly, the language.
Exposure to your chosen language occurs essentially through the little games within the game, the rest of the adventure occurring in English. These mini-games range from fairly simple (eg matching single words with their image) to more complicated (eg piecing together short 3 part phrases or completing 2 part phrases based on a picture). Each language task, and there are at least a dozen, has its own unique game, and might involve a word search, shooting down the words corresponding to a picture or plucking letters from the air that match their spoken sound. Only once did I find a game that sent you back to the beginning if you made an error, and you could make 3 of those. All the others seemingly allowed you to make as many errors as was required to complete the game - make a mistake and simply try again.
 The language learning included vocabulary, counting, sentence construction and grammar. The sound of the language is prominent, and that sound is matched with images and other aids to help the learning experience. You can be a total novice at the language to play, and whilst I suspect it is best used as a learning tool by a child who is learning the language elsewhere, its language focus needn't deter any child from playing. All of them may well have a good time.
Mia's world is a 3D animated world, saturated with colour and amusing characters. Watch out for the Vigil Ants and the Mosquito stuntmen. It is a side scrolling game, and Mia will simply follow the mouse. Just move the cursor around the screen and Mia will stroll along after it, or use her skateboard if you want her to move quickly. A hand or a finger cursor, and now and then a magnifying glass cursor, will indicate something that can be interacted with. Simply click to do so. As in many children's games, some interactions are simply there to be fun, others are necessary to move forward in the adventure.
Mia will gather things and store them in her backpack, and simply having the item will enable her to use it where it is needed. If you don't have it, Mia will probably prompt you. She will also not let you leave a screen if there are still things to do. As such, the stated target age group certainly seems to be the appropriate one.
The set-up screen is simplicity itself, and a small spider will talk you through what to do. You can also get Mia to show you how to operate in the world. My copy of the game came without a printed manual (but it did have a poster of Mia) but it really didn't matter. If all else fails a manual is on the CD. An options screen lets you fiddle with your settings, including turning hints on or off, plus it also allows you to access every mini- game directly, explaining the learning objective as well. Practicing and repetition is therefore straightforward and readily available.
You can do a full install and play without the CD, or choose a smaller install and use the CD to play. There are plenty of little animated cut scenes, and small loads (a few seconds) will occur each time. However only once did the screen go blank, and only for a short moment. Blank is boring for adults, let alone children, so keeping the images on the screen is a plus.
Mia herself is charming. Big eyes and long lashes, a falsetto mousy voice, and quite an expressive face. I mentioned she talks to you; she will also tap her foot if you leave her standing still for too long. The rest of the characters may not be as charming, but they are certainly engaging.
I played this game on and off with Clare, who is 10. She agreed that Mia was pretty cute, and while we had to guess at some of the French words and phrases, we couldn't help but learn some too. Clare thought the little games she played were fun. Shooting down the French words was her favourite. Getting Mia to chase the cursor and ride her skateboard (which makes her go faster) were also amusing little aspects in themselves she thought.
The Kidnap Caper will take more than a couple of hours, and of course you can increase the difficulty next time and choose the other language. It seemed to me to hit the mark for which it was aiming.
Copyright © Steve Ramsey with Clare 2004.
All rights reserved.
System Requirements:
Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Pentium II 400 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 12x CD ROM, 300 MB disk space, DirectX 8.1 (included on CD)
Mac OS X 10.2, G3 400 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 12x CD ROM, 300 MB disk space
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