Opera Fatal

 

Genre:   Adventure

Developer:   Ruske & Pühretmaier

Publisher:     Heureka Klett Software

Released:   1996

PC Requirements:   486/50 or better, 4 MB RAM, SVGA-compatible graphics card, Soundblaster-compatible sound card, 2x CD drive, Windows 95/98/3.1/NT, QuickTime 2.1.2.59

 

 

 

 

 

by Jenny100

Opera Fatal

Quicklist

  • Hybrid game - plays on Windows or Mac

  • Mouse-controlled, point-and-click (or point-and-drag) interface

  • Snapshot-type movement - no panning

  • Single CD

  • First person viewpoint

  • Geared toward a younger gamer

  • Refreshing lack of action or arcade sequences

  • Can't die in the game

  • May need Indeo codecs installed for the Mac version (included on the game CD)

  • 16-bit version of QuickTime 2.1.2.59 required for Windows (included on the game CD)

 

Opera Fatal is a music-oriented edutainment game published by Heureka-Klett. The cover of the box is adorned with the picture of an ornate old opera house set against a stormy night sky. The box looked spooky and mysterious in the small photos I saw of it on the Net. It wasn't until I ordered the game and saw the actual box itself that I became aware of it's slightly cartoonish aspect. I'd been expecting a more suspenseful game. The title Opera Fatal suggests drama and danger, doesn't it? Well I thought it did. I know better now. I have no idea where the Fatal in Opera Fatal comes from. Maybe someone died while they were making the game.

The box doesn't give an age range, but it's pretty obvious the game was meant for a younger gamer than myself. None of the puzzles are really hard. Nothing is really scary. Much of the opera house is brightly lit and colorful and the graphics are slightly cartoonish. The first time you hear footsteps running away just around the corner or see a shadow flitting across a passageway, you may get a bit of a thrill. But you always hear the same footsteps in the same places and see the same shadow flit across the same hallways. So the surprise element wears off pretty quickly. Instead you find unexpected bits of humor.

Clicking on things that are clickable may reward you in unexpected ways. The paintings of the composers on the wall of the upstairs hall may wink or make a funny face when you click on them. Cups of tea and coffeepots emit puffs of steam as if they conceal steam engines from a miniature choo choo train. There is a small café where two coffeepots with anthropomorphic features appear to be in the process of having an argument. Click between them and they will hiss at each other. You discover things like the forgotten remains of a dinner long past, hidden away in the drawers of desks. When you use a photocopy machine, you see a large lump passing through a pipe on the side of the machine before your paper copy emerges in the copy tray. Click on a bag you find in a chest and it will make a sound like the horn of a train. Click on a tube of toothpaste to pick it up and it will spurt toothpaste instead of going into inventory. The game is full of little surprises like this.

The edutainment part is on the light side - provided you've had any form of music lessons at some point in your life. The musical instruments that are described are probably instruments you've seen before. The makers of Opera Fatal didn't include any interesting antique or unusual types. The descriptions of the different musical periods are very brief. There are some lists of dates, which you may need to consult to answer questions or solve puzzles in the game, but which aren't likely to stick in your mind after you finish. Some of the interactive parts of the library which deal with musical chords and keys may be useful for someone who hasn't been exposed to this sort of thing before. I think 8 years old would not be too young to understand the material in the game. But the individual would need to have some interest in learning to read music in order to find it fun.

Most of the "puzzles" require the gamer to consult the edutainment resources. Some require the gamer to listen to musical samples. So if classical music really turns you off, this game is not for you. I've mentioned before that the puzzles are not difficult. By that, I mean they are logical. There is no complicated lateral thinking required. You have to methodically explore the opera house to search for the pages with the questions. And you'll probably need to consult the edutainment resources to find the answers to most of the questions you find. For some gamers, this may seem a little too much like a take-home test from school and not enough like an adventure game.

Story

Your character is the conductor of an orchestra. Someone has stolen the musical score and you must find it before the premiere of the opera house the following night. Somehow you know the missing music is to be found in the opera house so you start your search there. At the beginning of the game, you can only access a few areas. You find the thief has left you messages in the form of scraps of paper with numbered questions on them. For some reason, answering these questions, by typing the answers into a book on the desk in your office, allows you admission into new parts of the opera house. Despite the fact that you are a conductor and no doubt had to pass numerous college/conservatory courses in order to embark on your career, you often have to consult various sources of information within the game in order to find the answers to the questions. Every time you answer a set of questions you will be able to access something that will open up new areas for you to explore. For example, a closet door may come unlocked so you can pick up the key inside. The game ending was sort of disappointing, sort of corny, but not wholly unexpected given the character of the rest of the game. 

Edutainment resources

You have several sources of musical information in the game. The library has books on music theory and notation. As you page through the books, the narrator reads them to you (unless you turn him off in the game options). Each page has a sentence or two and an illustration. You can page ahead or back by clicking on arrows at the bottom of the screen. Some of the pages allow you to interact with the illustration. When interaction is available, you see a little yellow happy face at the bottom of the screen. You click on it to interact. The happy face sometimes comments on your actions. If you are asked to click on the notes of a scale and you click on the wrong ones, the happy face will shake its head, look sad, and go "mnh-nh." If you click on the right notes, the happy face will look especially happy and exclaim "Okay!" On those pages of the book where no interaction is allowed, the happy face goes all flat and disappears.

Another resource found in the library is the Music History Display, a sort of windowshade-type pull-down display with information on the different music periods covered in the game: Baroque (ca. 1600-1750), Classical (ca. 1750-1820), Romantic (1820-1880), and Impressionist (1880-1910). The display includes a very general description of the historical period, general characteristics of the music from that period, and a list of a few famous composers from that period. All twelve of the composers listed for the Romantic period have links that are accessible for further details. But only three of the nine Baroque composers listed have links for further information. Only three composers are listed at all under Classical (Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven) and only two under Impressionist (Debussy and Ravel). I'm sure they could have come up with more names than this if they'd made an effort. They could at least have listed them. They way they have it, they make it seem like the Romantic period produced far more composers than either the Classical or Impressionist periods. This is sort of a lopsided presentation if you ask me.

In case anyone is confused, "classical music" includes music from all the musical periods mentioned above - and more. In the general sense, "classical" refers to music generally considered to be of a more enduring type, in contrast to pop music. But "classical" also refers to music from a specific time period, lasting roughly from 1750 to 1820. I can remember my 2nd or 3rd grade teacher trying to explain this to the class. It confused me then and has bothered me ever since. Why didn't they call it something different instead of trying to confuse people? Oh well. Back to the review...

The conductor (your character) has a CD collection in his office which is grouped by musical period. The composers' names are listed on the back of the CD's. By clicking on a CD, you have access to a list of two or three pieces of music (or perhaps one long one) by that composer. You can read and listen to any of the music samples. Sometimes a single musical selection will be divided into two or more parts with a short pause in between. So if you want to hear everything, allow a little time after you think the selection is finished before clicking back to the CD Shelf. A single arrow at the left side of the menu bar will take you back one screen. A double arrow at the right side of the menu bar will take you back to the CD Shelf, from which you can either exit or choose another CD to listen to.

There is a poster on the wall of the music room which can be accessed for information on the musical instruments that are pictured there. When you click on an instrument you are taken to a screen where you can find the dimensions of the instrument, see the parts of the instrument labelled, listen to it play a sample which gives an idea of its range, and see a movie of the instrument being rotated so you can view it from different angles. There is also a picture of a small stage curtain which you can click on to open the curtain and watch and listen to a musician playing the instrument on the tiny stage. This poster also had a bug, described below in the section on Bugs.

The edutainment resources are accessible both from within the game and by clicking on icons in the main menu of the game. So when you're in the basement and suddenly find you need to know what year Ravel was born in so you can operate the elevator, you don't need to haul your tuckus all the way down the hall and up two flights of stairs to the library in order to look up this necessary information. You can simply exit to the main menu and access the Music History Display directly.

Installation

The game plays off the CD on both Windows and Mac platforms. Only the saves are kept on the hard drive.

The Windows version of Opera Fatal requires QuickTime 2.1.2.59 to play, which is included on the game CD. The game uses the 16-bit version of QuickTime 2.1.2.59. So if you have the 32-bit version of QuickTime 2.1.2.59 already installed on your computer, but not the 16-bit version, you'll need to install the 16-bit version from the CD. This is what happened to me. I had the 32-bit version installed (from either Amber or Nine) and when I tried to start Opera Fatal I got a nice black screen until I went back and installed the QuickTime version that came on the CD (and rebooted). After that the game worked just fine.

The Mac I tested on, an old 9500/200 with OS 9.1, already had QuickTime 4 installed. Since QuickTime is supposed to be backwards compatible on the Mac, I didn't install any QuickTime from the game CD. Most of the game ran fine. But I ran into a problem when I tried to access the movies in the Musical Instrument Poster. The little movies of the people playing the instruments would not play. So I went back and installed the codecs that were provided on the game CD. After that the movies played, but they did have a minor bug (discussed later under Bugs).

Documentation

The manual is quite a bit larger than most recent game manuals. It is 7½" x 9½" and 18 pages long. It includes black-and-white illustrations and explanations of the various interfaces you see in the game, including the main menu, the library Bookshelf, the pull-down Music History Display, the CD Shelf, and the Musical Instrument Poster. The information is all laid out pretty clearly. There are no confusing background images to obfuscate the printed words, so it is easier to read than a lot of recent game manuals. Unfortunately it does not include any useful troubleshooting tips.

Graphics

The graphics in Opera Fatal  are a little grainy. According to the manual, the first edition of Opera Fatal was published in 1996. This would have been a German version. My English version had most of the files dated 1996 or 1997 and seems to have been published in 1998. Colors are bright and cheerful in well-lit areas like the lobby. Other areas, like the basement, are darker. But most of the game is bright and the graphics have a whimsical feel. I tried reducing the brightness on my monitor to make the game seem a little creepier, but all this did was make it harder to see things in drawers. It just isn't a spooky game.

Opera Fatal does not use DirectX to automatically set the game resolution or color depth. Whatever your desktop is set to is what the game will run with. Graphics are displayed full screen (except for the narrow menu bar at the bottom) at 640x480. If you play the game with your desktop set to higher than 640x480, the game will function but the image will have a black frame around it. The higher your desktop resolution, the fatter the black frame.

The manual recommends running in 256 colors, but states that you can run at any color depth. With the desktop set to 16-bit color, most of the graphics will still be only 256 colors in the game. The exception is the movies of people playing instruments in the Musical Instrument poster. On the Mac, these movies had very weird colors when my desktop was set to 256 colors. On the PC they looked more normal, but still a bit off. They looked normal on both computers when the desktop was set to 16-bit color.  

One problem I encountered with my desktop set to 16-bit color was a malfunction in the operation of the pull-down display in the library, which occurred only on the Mac. More on this under Bugs. This problem may not appear on all Macs.

Sound Effects, Voices, and Music

Sound effects are good, though not outstanding. I assume the footsteps you hear hurrying away are those of the thief who stole the musical score. But to me they sounded like the footsteps of a little girl and I kept imagining this mischievous little girl running around leaving these messages to tease the nervous old maestro.

When you find an inventory item, solve a puzzle correctly, or write the correct answer in the book on the desk, you hear a musical chord or a fanfare to let you know you did something right. There is also a characteristic sound that you get when you click on something you can't interact with yet, but will at some point in the future.

The only character voice you hear is that of the conductor in the introduction. This voice sounded too young to be convincing as the voice as an old white-haired conductor. But you don't have to listen to it much. There is also the narrator that reads the books in the library and the descriptions in the Musical Instrument Poster to you. The narrator spoke clearly and was easy to understand. Except for one brief section in one of the library books, the narrator was always male.

The introduction to the game has dramatic music. But once you start playing the game, the music comes mostly in short snippets. You enter the main entrance hall and you hear the entrance hall snippet. You go downstairs into the basement area and you hear the creepy basement music snippet. The music often cuts off abruptly if you leave an area before the clip is finished. This happens a lot if you're trying to get from one place to another in a hurry. It gave me a fresh appreciation of games where the music fades out or dissolves into different music gradually. Maybe I've been spoiled by newer games, but there are older games than Opera Fatal which manage to change the music more gracefully.  There are some rooms, such as the room next to the elevator in the basement, where the music does not stop after the snippet plays, but loops around instead. As you get farther into the game, the new areas tend to have music that loops.

Some areas have background sound instead of music or a musical snippet. My favorite background sound was found in the boiler room - a combination of a low, organ-like sound with a somewhat sinister bubbling. When you enter the basement hall, you hear a dissonant crashing noise, which might actually seem threatening in a more serious game. The attic and other backstage areas tend to have background sound or ominous atonal mood music while the bright, well lit areas have cheerful music (or snippets). My favorite background music was in the sewing room. It was reminiscent of one of Satie's Gymnopedias. Satie is an Impressionist composer the game neglected to honor with a mention. If you've ever watched old Lassie reruns (the ones without Timmy) you've heard Satie's piano music.

Most of the music you hear during the game is lighthearted and playful, as you might expect in a kid's game. In a couple of rooms, it even resembles carnival music. Mostly it is tolerable but some of it can get really annoying, for example the snippets that play every single time you go through the main or upstairs lobby. Not only were they silly to start with, but their repetition became increasingly tiresome. After playing the game for a couple of hours during the day, these repetitive tunes lingered in my head and followed me around like a hard-to-digest dinner, generally making life more miserable than it had to be.

I have to say I expected a richer soundtrack in a game that's ostensibly about classical music. Most of the classical music in the game is in the samples you hear in the edutainment interfaces. I was expecting something more like Ring or Versailles, where you hear classical music throughout.

As far as I could tell, the sound was monaural and not stereo. Not a big deal with this game, but I wondered if something had gone wrong with my speakers at first. 

Interface

Opera Fatal is point-and-click and entirely mouse-driven. Every time you start the game you get the opening video, which you can skip by holding down the left mouse button (or the one-and-only mouse button on the Mac). Even if you skip the video, you get the tail end of it, where the conductor exclaims "I must find the music!" Then you must click your way into the opera house. Once you're inside, the menu bar will appear at the bottom of the screen. You will see any inventory you may collect in the menu bar. You access the main menu through the switch icon on the right side of the menu bar.

From the main menu you can save and load a game. Upon starting up the game, it takes a bit of fussing about to load a saved game. The first thing you will do is to skip the opening video. Next you must listen to the conductor do his little speech. Then you click your way into the opera house, click the switch icon in the menu bar to access the main menu, click to access the load screen, and finally click to load your saved game. *whew*

You can't just click anywhere and expect to move. You must move your cursor to some place on the screen where a movement arrow appears, and then click. Movement arrows are fairly self-explanatory. Arrows can indicate direction. Upward arrows may mean either move forward or zoom in. Downward arrows mean back away or back out of an interface. Bent arrows give an approximate idea of where you'll move to, though exactly how you'll move will depend on where you are. Movement is snapshot-like with no transitions other than a sort of dissolve which probably won't be noticeable on faster computers. You aren't always allowed to turn in all directions. Often you'll find that when you want to turn around, you can turn in one direction but not the other. In one hall, I had to move to the end of the hall before I could turn around. Movement is not that hard to get used to, but it seemed a little stiff to me.

Inventory collection and management is easy enough. Just click on an item to pick it up. If you want to use an item, click on it in inventory and the cursor will grab the item. Then click the item on whatever it is you want to use it on. Often a little animation will play - such as a wrench twisting a nut or a key turning in a lock. After use, the item will disappear from inventory. Sometimes you need to click-and-drag objects in the environment instead of just clicking on them. For example, to move marbles from one place to another you must keep the mouse button pressed as you move them or they'll drop off the cursor.

During the course of the game, you will find the thief has left you pages with numbered questions on them. To progress in the game, you must type the answers into the book on the conductor's desk. You can't keep the pages with the questions on them. You can pick them up and look at them, but you'll have to write down what they say. Don't forget to write down the number that goes with the question. Some of the pages that you find have clues or questions that help you solve puzzles or access new areas directly rather than being questions you need to answer in the conductor's book. For example, in order to summon the elevator to the basement, you will need to enter the year Ravel was born into the elevator control panel.

The options screen in the main menu has minimal options. You can adjust the overall volume of the game, turn off the narrator, turn off transitions (dissolves), adjust brightness, and access the four reference sections (listed as Music Examples, Music Theory, Instruments, and Music History). There are also controls to Save, Load, Return to the game, or Exit. I suggest you turn off "Transitions" since all they are is dissolves. Even on an old 200 MHz computer where you can see the dissolves, they aren't much to look at and only serve to make the game response seem sluggish. If you choose to reset any of the game options, you have to do it every time you restart the game because your preferences aren't saved anywhere.

Opera Fatal does allow you to rummage in desks and look in closets. In some cases, you'll have to set the things you look at back the way they were before you're able to exit the closeup screen and continue the game. For example, the down arrow to exit the screen may not appear until you close that drawer you've been searching through. Or the side arrow to turn away may not appear until you pull back that curtain you were looking behind. But other times a drawer or whatever will shut automatically when you back away. So it isn't 100% consistent.

Puzzles

Most of the puzzles in the game consist of finding the pieces of paper with the questions on them and typing the answers in the book on the conductor's desk. But you also collect inventory items. They're usually fairly straightforward - a key will fit in a lock, a cloth will wipe something, a wrench will turn a nut, a crank will crank something that was missing its crank, etc.

There are a few music puzzles. I think there were three separate occasions when I was called on to recognize a piece of music. But there was always some hint given in the question which would narrow down the possibilities enough so trial and error could get the answer. A trip to the CD collection and the fact that you only have a limited number of samples to choose from will further narrow the possibilities. Not only that, but the book you type the answers in tells you how many letters the answer has. So you see, trial and error and process of elimination will stand you in good stead if you have a tin ear.

Other puzzles involve figuring out how to restore power or set controls. The puzzles I had the most difficulty with were the ones about music terminology that required looking up things in the Music Theory books in the Library. It wasn't the difficulty of knowing which volume to look in so much as having to page through the sections that got to me. You can skip the narrations, but you can't skip the animations on those pages that have animations. This put some strain on my short supply of patience. I don't like having to wait to turn a page, even if it's only for a few seconds. By contrast, looking up dates was relatively easy. Either the Music History Display or the CD Collection or both would supply dates.

Bugs

The interface of the Musical Instrument Poster had a couple of bugs. On the Mac computer I needed to install the Indeo codecs from the game CD in order to see the little movies of the people playing the instruments. I got the movies then. But in addition to the moving image in the little mini-stage, I got a still image on the upper left side of my screen which was not supposed to be there. It would remain there even after the movie had finished unless I clicked on the icon for the musical scale, which got rid of it. Curiously, when I replayed the movie the unwanted still image would not reappear as long as I did not exit the screen for that particular instrument. Since I only have this one Mac to test on, I can't say for sure that all Macs would have this problem. It may be that the Indeo codecs on the CD weren't quite compatible with the QuickTime 4 that came with the OS 9.1 installation. Maybe newer codecs would have eliminated the problem. Considering the relatively benign nature of this bug, it didn't seem worth the time to troubleshoot.

More distressing was when the icon to back out of the Musical Instrument Poster did not appear. I moved the cursor all over the screen looking for it to appear. It did not. Just by chance (and by clicking madly in consternation) I discovered that clicking over toward the lower left part of the screen would back me out of it. So the hotspot was there even though the backwards arrow cursor did not appear. This particular problem appeared on both the Mac and the PC.

When running the game in 16-bit color, I encountered an unfortunate bug in the pull-down display in the library. This problem only occurred on the Mac. I would sometimes click on the name of a composer and no text would appear. The narrator would read something, but there was only a blank page to look at. And worst of all, there was no way out of that screen short of the three-fingered salute. Not only was there no cursor change to indicate a back-out hotspot, but clicking all over the screen, which had produced such glorious results in the Musical Instrument Display, was an exercise in futility. After using the Mac equivalent of a three-fingered salute to close down the game (alt-clover-escape), I changed to 256 colors and found the problem did not recur. Repeated testing seemed to indicate that the pull-down display interface is not entirely reliable when the game is run at 16-bit color, but seemed to always work at 256 colors. This bug only occurred on the old Mac I was testing on and not on the PC, but I suggest you save your game before consulting the pull-down display just in case.

As noted earlier, the videos of the people playing instruments in the Musical Instrument Poster did not look right when played in 256 colors. The manual says the game will run at any color depth, but "We recommend setting your monitor to 256 colors. Opera Fatal runs smoothest this way." Considering how ugly the movies of the people playing the instruments looked when I ran the game using 256 colors and considering that the problem with the pull-down display only appeared on the Mac computer, I'd recommend running the game in 16-bit to start with. Just be sure to save before using the pull-down display in the library.

Minimum System Specs

Windows:

486/50 or better

4 MB RAM

SVGA-compatible graphics card

Soundblaster-compatible sound card

2x CD drive

Windows 95/98/3.1/NT 

QuickTime 2.1.2.59

Possibly later versions of Windows work as well.

Mac:

PowerPC

5 MB RAM free

System 7 (works up through OS 9.1 and probably in OSX by using Classic)

2X CD drive

Tested Computers

I played the game from start to finish on the following computers:

PII 266 (266 MHz)

Windows 98SE

Matrox Mystique video card

Soundblaster AWE 32 sound card

used Daemon-Tools to create a virtual CD drive

DirectX 7a (which the game doesn't use anyway)

QuickTime 2.1.2.59 (16-bit version) from the game CD

 

Mac 9500/200 (200 MHz)

Mac OS 9.1

ATI Mach 64 video card

onboard sound

8X SCSI CD drive

QuickTime 4

I briefly tested the game on the following computer:

Pentium 200 (Dell Optiplex GXPro 200 MHz )

Windows 95b

SiS video card

Onboard sound card equivalent to an ISA Soundblaster 16

8X CD drive

DirectX 7a

QuickTime 2.1.2.59 (16-bit version) from the game CD

This is one game that benefits from using a CD emulation program to run it from the hard drive. Even on much faster computers than the ones listed, there will be some lag in moving around because there is no install and all game information is on the CD. So you must wait for the CD to spin up before you can move - unless you use a CD emulation program.

The game actually ran better and was more stable on the Windows computers. I didn't have the problem with the screens in the Music History interface coming up blank on the PC. And when running in only 256 colors on the PC, the little movies of the people playing instruments didn't have quite such weird colors. Also the problem with the extra window appearing when I activated the little movies of the people playing instruments only appeared on the Mac. I was surprised that the game had fewer problems on the PC. I suspect that the PC version had more extensive testing by the game manufacturers.

My Unsolicited Opinion

If you know anything about classical music, even if it's only from the liner notes of your CD collection, you probably know more than you'll read about in this game. The information about musical notation seems accurate enough, though I seem to remember there were three possible minor scales and not just two. The game is geared toward musical beginners, but I still think it could have been more interesting and more informative in its music history section. Dates, lists, and vague generalizations are so dry - the sort of thing that put me off history all through school up until college. And I'd much rather have heard more examples of famous classical music as I was exploring the opera house instead of those silly tunes they used instead.

Despite the game's problems, I mostly enjoyed playing. It was a nice change from games with difficult puzzles or games where you always have to worry about timed or action sequences or meeting your doom around every corner. In Opera Fatal you can take your time. And even if you aren't particularly interested in the edutainment part, it's sort of fun to rummage through drawers and explore the various parts of the opera house. I appreciated the humorous touches and got a good laugh at the animation they used for the painting of Mendelssohn in the upstairs hall.

Back in 1996 when the game first came out, it probably looked pretty good and the limits on which direction you could turn may have been more commonplace and seemed less restrictive. As an edutainment game for younger gamers who are interested in music, it is not bad. But as far as I know, the English version is only available from Heureka-Klett for 49.90€ + shipping. I wouldn't recommend anyone pay more than $20 for it unless they enjoy collecting unusual games and have money to burn. I also would not recommend it for anyone who doesn't have the slightest interest in classical music or the details of musical notation. Unless a person has some interest in the material, too many of the questions will seem fussy and having to look up things in the reference sections will be a chore. A lot of the game does involve finding a page and then looking up the answer in one of the reference sections.

The idea of an edutainment game featuring classical music does have some merit. Many of the best game soundtracks feature classical (or classical-sounding) music. And an old opera house could be a suitably spooky and mysterious place to explore, haunted by the ghosts of old opera characters and full of treacherous stage machinery. Unfortunately Opera Fatal was made so as not to scare a 6-year old.

I think edutainment games are successful if the gamer enjoys the game well enough and retains some of the information after playing. In this respect, Opera Fatal could have been a lot better. My mind does not retain dates. It does not retain musical terminology. If I were a musician and used musical terms regularly, I would retain them. But I'm not, so I don't. I think most people don't. What I do remember is things like stories or amusing anecdotes or the sound of a piece of music. If the game had used more classical music outside of the CD Collection interface, I'd have been exposed to a lot more of it. And if the game identified the composer of the music I was listening to as I was exploring the opera house, I'd eventually start to associate that music with that composer. That kind of thing would stick with me a lot better than a lot of dates. In my opinion, the game placed too much emphasis on dates and musical terminology and not enough on simple appreciation of the music.

Recommendations

I think the person most apt to enjoy this game is a child with a strong curiosity about classical music and musical instruments - someone who would enjoy listening to all the music in the CD Collection and reading, listening to, and interacting with all the books in the library and all the instruments in the Musical Instrument Poster. Once you've gone through all this stuff, you have a good idea where to look for information when you come across a page with a question you can't quite remember the answer to. Researching the question takes very little time and then you can get back to exploring.

On the other hand, someone who only wants to consult the edutainment interfaces when absolutely necessary is going to find it very tedious locating the answers to the music terminology questions. I would not recommend the game to anyone like this.

Overall Grade:     B+

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