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Rating: 
Summary: Not Very Rewarding
Review: In a word, disappointing. We purchased this game thinking it was representative of Disney interactive products. At first, our five year old son enjoyed playing it but quickly bored of it. Kids have to repeat the phonics exercises over and over and over again - sometimes more than 10 times - to receive any kind of fan-fare or reward in retrieving the Sorcerer's lost items. Excellent graphics and great activities but there certainly should be more verbal or graphic reward as incentives to make the child want to further pursue the game. Kids of this age react much better to more frequent reward...and this game just disappoints for computer active, advanced children. Other Disney products have been better received.
Rating: 
Summary: Almost very good
Review: My daughter is 4 and loves all things Disney. This game has a lot to offer and in the beginning she was very gung-ho about playing. But at this age, there needs to be rewards rather frequently to maintain their interest. In Phonics Quest, there are plenty of choices for her to choose from-which is great. And many of the games are quite educational. There is a game for sorting and listening skills. One for ryhming words. Another for patterns. There is simple spelling-fill in the missing letter, and so on. The problem with it is that the kids have to work for a long time to get each prize-the missing items from the castle for which Mickey is on a quest. By a long time, I mean that they have to answer about 20 or more problems in each of the 6 rounds. Then, there are 6 prizes in all to get. Now, after all of this hard work, one would expect a little fanfare for the kids to make it worth fighting for. But the fan fare is almost non existent and then just rushes you off to do it again. I find its the fan fare that keeps them coming back for more. Jaclynn has stopped coming back for more after about 4 rounds and dubbed the game boring.
Rating:
Summary: Almost very good
Review: My daughter is 4 and loves all things Disney. This game has a lot to offer and in the beginning she was very gung-ho about playing. But at this age, there needs to be rewards rather frequently to maintain their interest. In Phonics Quest, there are plenty of choices for her to choose from-which is great. And many of the games are quite educational. There is a game for sorting and listening skills. One for ryhming words. Another for patterns. There is simple spelling-fill in the missing letter, and so on. The problem with it is that the kids have to work for a long time to get each prize-the missing items from the castle for which Mickey is on a quest. By a long time, I mean that they have to answer about 20 or more problems in each of the 6 rounds. Then, there are 6 prizes in all to get. Now, after all of this hard work, one would expect a little fanfare for the kids to make it worth fighting for. But the fan fare is almost non existent and then just rushes you off to do it again. I find its the fan fare that keeps them coming back for more. Jaclynn has stopped coming back for more after about 4 rounds and dubbed the game boring.
Rating: 
Summary: Good teaching tool, but not enough magic
Review: We just got back from Disneyworld so my daughter was very eager to play this new "game."She is still playing it, but keeps asking: "where's Mickey?" The idea is that Mickey travels around trying to retrieve stuff missing from the castle. Each missing item can only be recovered after completing a lengthy phonics drill. During most of the drills Mickey and the recognizable Disney characters are off-screen. And you have to correctly answer a large number of questions before you get a prize. The cute animated graphics only briefly disguise the fact that these are pretty routine exercises. The software worked very well on our old PC (AMD 500 Mhz, no graphics card). No problems installing or delays in loading etc... The software automatically adjusts the difficulty level based on the accuracy of the responses. This should allow the software to be used for a long time as a child's skills improve. The software comes with a microphone and voice recognition software. Unfortunately you have to "train" the voice recognition software to understand a user's speech patterns by reading lengthy texts into the microphone. Do you see the problem here? If my daughter could read those texts then we wouldn't be buying this CD... I can read the texts, but my voice is quite different from my daughters. The end result was that when a "voice recognition" opportunity appeared during the game my daughter would shout answers into the microphone and get no response.
Rating:
Summary: Good teaching tool, but not enough magic
Review: We just got back from Disneyworld so my daughter was very eager to play this new "game." She is still playing it, but keeps asking: "where's Mickey?" The idea is that Mickey travels around trying to retrieve stuff missing from the castle. Each missing item can only be recovered after completing a lengthy phonics drill. During most of the drills Mickey and the recognizable Disney characters are off-screen. And you have to correctly answer a large number of questions before you get a prize. The cute animated graphics only briefly disguise the fact that these are pretty routine exercises. The software worked very well on our old PC (AMD 500 Mhz, no graphics card). No problems installing or delays in loading etc... The software automatically adjusts the difficulty level based on the accuracy of the responses. This should allow the software to be used for a long time as a child's skills improve. The software comes with a microphone and voice recognition software. Unfortunately you have to "train" the voice recognition software to understand a user's speech patterns by reading lengthy texts into the microphone. Do you see the problem here? If my daughter could read those texts then we wouldn't be buying this CD... I can read the texts, but my voice is quite different from my daughters. The end result was that when a "voice recognition" opportunity appeared during the game my daughter would shout answers into the microphone and get no response.
Rating: 
Summary: My 5 Year old loves this games ! Excellent product !
Review: We purchased this title yesterday and she has been playing it for two days straight. This is by far the best reaction we have seen out of the 15 or so titles she already owns. The game is easy to interface with for kinds as young as 4 and entertaining enough for kids up to 6. Unless your child has some challenges with learning, I don't think it would be a worthwhile purchase for any child much over the age of 6.
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