kanatest

While kanatest isn't a game in any real sense, it does have the virtue of doing what it's supposed to do. It's a flashcard game: it shows you 'kana' characters and you type in the 'romajin' equivalent.

As such, it's not an enthralling game for someone who a.) doesn't know any Japanese characters, and b.) wants to play a game, and not learn Japanese characters. If, however, you are someone studying Japanese and need something to assist you in memorizing the characters, rock on. You've found your saviour!

In all honesty, it's pretty full-featured. You can choose between what appear to the illiterate-in-Japanese-eye to be the two styles in which the characters are rendered, and further choose which characters you want to be drilled on, either by using one of the pre-created 'lessons' or by creation your own lesson.

Sure, there's no sound, and the graphics (read: fonts) aren't awe-inspiring. They don't have to be. This is an educational tool, and not a game, and while you can make educational tools as pretty as you like, their foremost function is... to function. As far as functional designs go, kanatest is great. Simple, clear, easy to figure out without consulting a manual or the internet, and best of all, in fully working order.

For the record, the version included in the repositories is two releases out of date. Click the link above to go to the website for kanatest and download the latest version. All of you broke otaku desperate to learn Japanese characters so you can feel elite, here's a great tool for ya. All others need not apply (except, obviously, non-otaku who still want to learn Japanese).

glpuzzle

While glpuzzle is good enough at the very limited thing that it does, I suspect gCompris (reviewed here) offers a similar 'game' that, at the very least, offers a few more pictures. glpuzzle is a jigsaw-puzzle program; it comes with twelve photos, ranging in difficulty from 4 - 25 pieces. It was hard enough to take me a whole minute and a half to finish the one with 25.

Obviously, I'm not the target market for the software - I hesitate to call it a game - but even for five-year-olds, it's a bit lackluster. It works perfectly, but with only twelve photos total, someone with basic motor-skills and decent vision/pattern recognition would maybe be able to kill thirty minutes with this. A few of the photos are so busy I suspect the uber-young, who are the only people who could benefit from the game, would have difficulty solving them.


It seems like you should be able to add photos, and create your own puzzles, but there's no mention of that on the website and the photos are in some proprietary-to-the-software format that Gimp doesn't recognize. To nit-pick and add insult to this poor programmer's injury, the sound it makes when you connect a piece made my nerves crawl. I may have had the volume up too loud.

In short, throw it on our PC if you want to amuse your pre-school aged children for a bit, but don't expect it to hold their attention for long. As mentioned, gCompris has a gazillion things that would serve to sharpen the same skills, in a more aesthetically pleasing package that also offers tons more. I don't recommend glpuzzle for anyone over the age of four.

gLife

gLife is another non-game. It's an artificial life simulator. You can alter a few characteristics via the preference menu, but the gist of it is very simple: you click 'start' and these dots start to move around. There are male dots, female dots, and terrain dots. Watch. Be engaged.

Honestly, it's not that engaging, but it was sort of sad. Around 220 turns in, all the dots stopped reproducing, leaving unoccupied yellow terrain dots behind as they died of old age. Finally there was only one little guy left (I was amused that it was a guy; considering that women have longer lifespans in virtually every society, you would think the last person alive would be female) and he bounced from square to square, a hopeless dot in a wasteland of yellow.

What does it all mean? Beats me. This is an interesting-for-thirty-seconds novelty unless you're going to dig into the source-code and alter bits n' pieces of the rulesets to run experiments on artificial life systems or what-have-you. It hasn't been updated since 2000, but the elephant's graveyard that is SourceForge still has the page up for it. The messageboard there is almost as sad as the last blue dot on earth, scurrying about the desert.

GCompris

I am not the target market for GCompris: it's "an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10." I'm ashamed to admit that I still had some fun with it.

I think the docs say there are a total of around 80 games, though not all work without some additional packages installed (specifically, the ones that require the computer to speak seem to require an extra voice-pack for your language). There were more than enough to occupy my alcohol-addled brain for a while, as I bounced from memory games to alphabet and reading games.

They were still a bit below my grade level, but I was amazed at the quality and level of polish. They're going for an easy-to-see, broad, over-sized, childlike sort of look, and with that in mind, the software is almost perfect. While the controls and the goals for each of the games/applications weren't always immediately obvious, it never took more than a second or three of experimentation to figure out what was going on.

And even though the games are for the 2-10 year old age bracket, some of them are actually a bit difficult, in that Brain Age brain-training sort of way. Especially fun (for me) was the kiddy-sudoku that used shapes instead of numbers; there were smaller grids a very limited number of shapes, to start with, but it kept ramping up the difficulty until it was halfway as hard as a normal game of sudoku, but also only half as annoying. I dug it.

Graphically, as mentioned, this is a child-like delight to behold. The GCompris apps all share the same sort of aesthetic, and they're all quite functional. Things which are not the same are quite obviously different, and everything it bright and bold and easy to see.

The sound was also oddly great. Background music tended toward the classical/orchestral type - presumably thanks to those studies in back in the day that suggested we learn better when we're listening to the old masters' symphonies - but occasionally wandered into more contemporary electronic terrain. Sound effects were as easily differentiated as the visual cues, letting players/students know via multiple senses that they'd done something correctly (or not).

I doubt anyone reading this is going to be very interested in an educational software suite aimed at primary-schoolers. But it must be said that this is a very polished piece of software, indeed, and is absolutely on par with pay software of the same type. It should be noted, of course, that generally edutainment software even in the retail sphere is pretty shoddy. If you've got kids in the house, this is almost definitely better than anything you could purchase. The only downside is that it doesn't contain any licensed characters to hook your kids into the learning. :)