Children's Games Roundup: Mazoocard, Toy Xylophone, and Simon Cow

Anyone who has minor kids knows that they are fascinated by both phones and videogames. Handing off a phone to your child while in the car or at a restaurant can be a groovy way to continue the little one occupied. Indie developer Ganlok Studios has produced three fine kids' games for Windows Phones: Mazoocard, Toy Xylophone, and Simon Moo-cow. Each title offers clean, bonny graphics, simple gameplay, and a not bad user interface.

Head by the intermission for our full three-game review.

Mazoo Card

Mazoocard gameplay

Mazoocard is probably Ganlok's most fleshed-out championship. It is an animal-themed retention card game. You know how it works: flip over 2 cards and hope for a match. If they don't match, attempt to remember what they were and then option a new card to come across if it matches the ones y'all've seen before.

Mazoocard excels mainly due to its copious set of options. Before playing, players can switch between v different sets of options by tapping the menu names at the superlative of the screen.

Cards: The default starting screen. Choose to play with 9 different quantities of cards, from 6 (easiest) to 48 (hardest).
Players: Mazoocard supports caput-to-head play on a single device. Players are instructed to plough the phone to landscape mode, with each person playing from reverse ends of the phone. Play alternates from one gamer to another. If a lucifer is made, the thespian gets another try; if not, the other person gets a plough. This is a great way to relish the game with your child or friends.
Foreground: Select from iv sets of cards: animals, numbers, colors, and messages. The cute fauna art is the default, and I like it best.
Background: Choose from six colorful wallpapers.
Settings: Here you can allow players to preview all the cards for iii, v, or vii seconds at the outset of the game; peek at cards for two, 4, or 6 seconds during multiplayer turns, or toggle sound effects on or off. Unfortunately the game has no music, but I doubt kids will mind.

Mazoocard options

Mazoocard has everything yous could want in a memory menu game. While there are several other games of this type on the Marketplace, Mazoo's options and fine art fashion outdo the competition.

Rating: 8.

Toy Xylophone

Toy Xylophone

Toy Xylophone is classified as a game, but it's really more of a musical learning tool. Existent xylophones are percussion instruments consisting of a row of wooden bars, as well known as keys. Ganlok'southward xylophone divides its xv keys into ii rows so that each cardinal is large and piece of cake to tap. It sounds realistic and supports multi-affect – it's easy to hitting two keys simultaneously just as one would on a real instrument. Players can toggle between colored keys or a uniform wooden appearance by tapping the gear icon at the top of the screen.

The feature that really gives Toy Xylophone some staying power is its Song Book. Press the music note icon at the top of the screen and a list of 72 songs pops upwardly. The list includes many childhood favorites such as ABC, If You lot're Happy and You Know information technology, Twinkle Twinkle Lilliputian Star, and even the Elmo Song. Songs that originate from other countries like Day-O (Jamaica) and Momotaro (Japan) are clearly differentiated by their countries' flags. Select a vocal and it plays on the in-game xylophone, each fundamental highlighting as it'due south struck.

Toy Xylophone song book

Simply listening to each song is fun enough, but Toy Xylophone has a few learning tools likewise. A tempo slider makes it easy to come across just what notes a song contains as it plays out. The Mute push button cancels the automatic sounds as a song plays out. But hitting the keys still produces notes, so users can play along as the keys low-cal upwards and but hear the ones they're hitting.

Toy Xylophone is a great app for young music fans and fifty-fifty adults with a casual involvement in the instrument. A few additions would increase the app's entreatment to the older oversupply, such as an Advanced menu in which users could record their own songs, plus additional playback options for the Vocal Volume like Echo and Continuous Play. Thankfully the recording option is planned for a future update.

Rating: 8.5.

Simon Cow

But every bit Mazoocard is based on the bill of fare game Memory, Simon Cow draws inspiration from the electronic game Simon. A group of colors (or animals in this example) course a circle on the screen. A sequence of colors plays out which the player must then repeat. The sequence starts with a unmarried color but adds an boosted step each turn, until finally the player makes a mistake and the game ends.

Simon Cow crams a bunch of options onto a single screen before the game begins:

Number: Select from three, 4 (default), five, vi, or eight different colors to keep track of during play.
Sounds: Creature sounds, chimes, or no sounds
Play rotation: This pick adds some claiming by rotating the wheel of colors prior to the starting time of each sequence. The sequence itself is unaffected, just the rotation serves as a distraction.
Answer timer: As you might expect, this limits the amount of time the histrion has to repeat the original sequence.
New sequence: If you lot really desire to brand the game hard, try having it first a new sequence every turn instead of building 1 long sequence.
No animals: By default, each colored circumvolve has an animal face on it. Turn them off to play with transparent colored circles instead.
High scores: This game keeps a local score board. Information technology even tracks what options scores were achieved under - is a nice touch.

Simon Cow high scores

I didn't relish Simon Cow as much as Ganlok'due south other titles mainly because I've never liked Simon. I don't merely mean people named Simon (jerks, all of them), only the game itself. Even equally a kid, I would rather accept received socks as a gift than the electronic Simon game. But in that location are surely people out there who don't feel the aforementioned manner, and they would probably get a kick out of the options this version throws into the mix. My other complaint is Simon Moo-cow's art style – the animals are kind of ugly. Perhaps the developer should swap them out with Mazoocard's animal drawings instead.

Rating: 6.

Overall Impression

Each of Ganlok'southward games is probable to exist a hit with kids. They all focus on a single thing – retentiveness cards, xylophone music, and Simon says – and do information technology really well. My preschool-age daughter likes Mazoocard the best and Simon Moo-cow the least, mirroring my own tastes exactly. Parents are also leap to love the games' prices: Mazoocard has both a total paid version and a slightly trimmed-down simply free Lite version; Toy Xylophone both come in Paid and ad-supported Free versions; and Simon Cow is just free.

Mazoocard comes in $.99 and free varieties. Grab the total version here or the Calorie-free version here (Zune links) on the Marketplace.
Toy Xylophone also costs $.99 or null cents, depending on which version you buy. You lot tin can find the paid version here and the free version here.
Simon Moo-cow is free – pick it upwardly for the kids right here.

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