Wild Thornberrys The Movie (PC, THQ General)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * *)

The Thornberry clan will be familiar to anyone who has watched the Nickelodeon Channel, or seen the movie this game is based on.

It's all good, clean fun, with healthy doses of family bonding, helping defenceless animals, saving the world and so on. It even carries the World Wildlife Fund logo.

Just the sort of thing to quote when people of a certain age start ranting about the perils of computer games. The movie follows the Thornberrys on safari in Africa, where Eliza puts her special ability to talk to animals to good use by making friends with Darwin, a chimpanzee.

While the movie centres on Eliza and Darwin's quest to rescue a cheetah cub from a poacher, in the game you rescue different animals in 10 levels.

It is cute, harmless fun, best played by younger children, who will be challenged by a series of puzzles and arcade mini-games that are unlocked as you progress through the levels.

The game would be suitable for anyone with an older computer as it requires just a 200Mhz processor and 32mb of ram.


Meanwhile, EA is preparing to unleash its first expansion pack for the excellent Command & Conquer Generals in the spring.

Zero Hour will introduce new armies, giving a total of nine, and add a further 15 singleplayer missions.

Generals is a great game, but suffered from a quick-to-finish campaign mode and a shortage of skirmish maps. New ones can be created with a complex tool called World Builder, or downloaded from Generals sites.

The simple random map generator included with its predecessor, Red Alert, was much easier to use, and gave that game unlimited replayability.

Generals, of course, was quite controversial when it came out this year, as it involved attacking Baghdad and fighting a global terror army.

Zero Hour takes a similar approach. Missions include sending US troops to find weapons of mass destruction, or getting GLA operatives to destroy the US Mediterranean fleet.

* Email Peter Eley