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Game #2500
Hall of Belated Fame Inductee  Barney Bear Goes to Space    View all Top Dogs in this genre
Education   Early childhood

Rating: 7.6 (10 votes)

Barney Bear Goes to Space box cover

Barney Bear Goes to Space screenshot
The Barney Bear series games are excellent edutainment titles aimed at teaching the basics of various subjects to toddlers aged 1 to 4 years old. Aside from being some of the finest titles ever made for this (some would say hard to please) target group, the games are notable for using SBTalker, Creative Labs’ proprietary text-to-speech program that shipped with early versions of Sound Blaster card. The narrator in all Barney Bear games therefore sounds exactly like that mechanical, HAL-style voice of Dr. Sbaitso, a program shipped with SBTalker to showcase its capabilities.

Each Barney Bear title focuses on one subject, and features Barney, a cute Teddy bear, as the player’s companion and star in the stories. For example, in Barney Bear Goes to School, kids will learn rudimentary algebra, pattern recognition, and what an experience of going to school might feel like. In Barney Bear Goes To Space, kids will learn the basics of space travel and objects in space. Every Barney Bear game offers two modes of play: story, and game. In story mode, a story involving Barney and the topic will be shown in attractive scenes, all fully narrated. Kids can interact with various "hot spots" on the scene before flipping to the next page. In game mode, all the activities are laid out and presented in one place, where kids can easily jump from one to the next.

What makes Barney Bear games special is not only the excellent presentation that will capture kids’ attention, but the near-perfect balance between game and information in each title. In Barney Goes to Farm, for example, kids will watch an animated story of how a seed grows into a tree, asked by the game to count the number of apples in a scene, and learn how to milk a cow. The game sets a fine balance between honing kids’ basic skills, letting them learn interesting knowledge, and offering them fun activities. In short, these are some of the best games for toddlers ever designed, although they were much less known than titles from big companies. And kids will probably find the inhuman SBTalker voice even somewhat amusing. Highly recommended!

Reviewed by: Underdogs
Designer: David Krohne & Stephen Beam
Developer: Free Spirit
Publisher: Free Spirit
Year: 1992
Software Copyright: Free Spirit
Theme:  
Multiplayer:  
None that we know of
System Requirements: DOS
Where to get it:
Related Links:  
Links:    
If you like this game, try: Barney Bear Goes to School, Barney Bear Goes to Farm, Manhole, The

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