Charlie Brown game teaches young kids baseball

— -- With baseball season officially opening this week, parents wanting to teach their kids about the national pastime have many options, from becoming bleacher bums at Major League games to signing kids up for Little League. Another fun option involves the beloved cartoon character Charlie Brown and your computer.

In Peanuts: It's the Big Game, Charlie Brown! by Viva-Media, kids help everyone's favorite "Blockhead" recruit his friends to form a baseball team. In the process, they learn how to play the game, practice and then participate in a simple baseball simulation game.

Unlike Backyard Baseball 2009, another kids' baseball simulation game, the Peanuts game isn't just a sports simulation. It also contains an adventure game full of logic puzzles, mini-arcade games and short baseball tutorials that teach how to play the bigger, baseball simulation game.

When starting the software, you have a choice of going on an adventure with Charlie Brown to get the team together or going straight to the baseball simulation. Helping Charlie Brown is fun, so start there.

As manager of the neighborhood baseball team, Charlie Brown has high hopes for this season, until he shows up at the first practice to find no one is there. Good grief!

In this point-and-click adventure, you direct Charlie Brown as he walks around his neighborhood, visiting his friends. He needs to recruit five players, but each has a social condition that needs to be met before he or she will join the team. By clicking on the characters that you meet, you talk to them and get a hint about their social requirement.

For example, Peppermint Patty won't join the team until Charlie Brown has recruited other good players. Schroeder won't play until Charlie Brown has figured out a way to make Lucy leave Schroeder's house. (As in the comic strip, Lucy is pining over Schroeder by staring at him while he practices his piano.)

By meeting a friend's social requirement, you open up that friend's minigame. There are five minigames in all, and each can be played on three levels of difficulty. These minigames reflect the personality of the friend as developed in Charles Schultz's cartoon strip. Thus, the game with child psychiatrist Lucy is a trivia game about the likes and dislikes of each of the players. She won't play baseball with Charlie Brown until he can pass her "Psychological Baseball-Manager Test." Likewise, Schroeder won't play unless Charlie Brown shows some respect for music by playing a game of repeating a musical phrase on a virtual keyboard.