Nickelodeon and Humongous Entertainment have released BLUE'S 123 TIME
ACTIVITIES, a new CD-ROM game based on Nickelodeon's popular preschool
television show, BLUE'S CLUES. BLUE'S 123 TIME ACTIVITIES allows
preschoolers to practice pre-math and problem-solving skills with Blue and
her friends. Individually paced, multi-level learning activities help kids
develop logical thinking and deductive reasoning skills, practice simple
math, and explore numerical estimation and prediction. In the game,
preschoolers join Blue at the Backyard Fair where they strengthen early
math skills by exploring a variety of activities. They may add and subtract
building supplies to help Tink construct a train ride for the fair; help
Bell and the Scale triplets fill requests by weighing and comparing fair
souvenirs; or join Baby Bear in a card game of counting, matching and
strategy, among other activities. By collecting Blue Dollars at each
activity, preschoolers can help Blue win one of many big prizes at the
prize tent. The BLUE'S CLUES television show stars a live-action host named
Steve (played by actor Steven Burns) who lives in an animated, storybook
setting. In each episode, Steve invites the audience to help him solve the
day's puzzles, which come in the form of blue paw print clues left by his
energetic, animated girl puppy, Blue. The show encourages its young viewers
to play along with the show by presenting them with questions to answer and
games to solve. The dialogue and animation in every episode is specially
timed so that Steve pauses to "wait" for the kids to answer his questions,
direct his next move or discover a clue. BLUE'S 123 TIME ACTIVITIES is
currently available on hybrid CD-ROM for Windows 1998/95 and Macintosh for
$19.99.


Wendy Jackson wrote about BLUE'S CLUES in "Dig This! Using computers to
simulate cut-out animation techniques on South Park and Blue's Clues" in
the September 1998 issue of Animation World Magazine.