Nature game features strong girl role model
— -- Families looking for girl-centric video games that aren't about fashion and shopping might want to give Emma in the Mountains a try. Based on a French literary heroine, this new Nintendo DS game features a brave redheaded girl who is a nature lover.
While visiting her Grandpa Ted in the mountains, Emma helps to solve a mystery of why the groundhogs aren't around, even though it's spring and well past the time for them to have awakened from hibernation.
Told in a story format with 15 activities interspersed throughout, the game asks kids to solve a nature mystery by visiting different locations, playing minigames and talking to both humans and animals.
To play this video game, kids need to be old enough to read because it unfolds through written dialog spoken by Emma, her cousin Andy who accompanies her, Emma's talking dog Pickles and others.
As you play through the story, all of the activities become unlocked for play separate from the story mode. You also unlock bonus materials, including coloring games, jigsaw puzzles and nature fact sheets. And once you have finished the story, you can play through it again on a harder difficulty level.
This isn't a typical arcade-type kids' game, but rather a cute nature story with a variety of interactive elements and minigames. For example, as you start on your journey to find the missing groundhogs, you stop to have a snowball fight with your cousin. Every time he pops up to throw a snowball at you, if you tap him first, your snowball will careen across the screen and throw him off balance. In another, you use the DS stylus to wipe away the snow so that you can find your dropped keys.
The story line explores how groundhogs fit into the food chain of animals found in the mountains, and some of the minigames even have a pro-environmental theme. For example, in one your goal is to find trash left by tourists, which is polluting the groundhogs' environment. In another, you match footprints in the snow to the animals that made them.
