![]() ![]() These new key-smashing games lack some of the innocent charm of their predecessors, but more than make up for this with a greater range of shapes, colors, images, and sounds - especially AlphaBaby and KeyWack. It is also the only one of these products that has been made available for the iPhone and iPad, to the certain delight of many parents traveling with their toddlers. AlphaBaby stands out among these as the most customizable, allowing you to easily add your own sounds and images for a personalized experience. Baby Smash is unfortunately no longer in development.Īlmost two decades later, though, the genre is beginning to thrive, with four products all vying for your toddler’s attention: the open-source AlphaBaby, donationware BabySplat, KeyWack, and a different, unaffiliated BabySmash, which is somewhat ironically Windows-only. KeyWack has since changed author and is now available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, with the added option to limit the display to sequential numbers or letters - useful for teaching counting and reading/reciting the alphabet through play. Fart sounds, speech, pretty patterns, bright colors, drawings, shapes of various sizes and type, and bells and whistles of dozens of different frequencies are just some of the things that filled your screen and blasted out of your speakers. The games were a remarkable leap forward in interactive entertainment for toddlers, though adults of more infantile levels of maturity could also appreciate their charm. Each input was met with immersive audio-visual feedback, such as an oval filled with a checkerboard pattern or the sound of a telephone. The goal - if you could call it such - was to either press random keys on the keyboard or click the mouse. ![]() In fact, the only major difference between the two games was the means by which you could exit: Baby Smash required an awkward key combination, which was as difficult to remember as to accidentally press, while KeyWack asked you simply to have enough coordination to select “Quit” from the drop-down “File” menu.īoth provided gamers with a blank white screen to start with, although KeyWack kept the traditional Macintosh menu bar across the top. Neither mapped specific keys to specific images or sounds. Both utilized built-in sound effects and pattern graphics from Macintosh System 7. Justin Cohen’s Baby Smash! and Paul Duffy’s KeyWack went head-to-head in cornering the market for random key-smashing games on the Mac in 1993, with each offering slightly different variations on what was essentially the same game. But two ambitious Mac game developers attempted to cater to their needs in the early 1990s, and now, more than 15 years later, the key-smashing genre is rising to the fore. I’d go so far as to suggest that this has been the most under-represented group of gamers - apart from cats that like to sleep or walk on keyboards. I paid $20 for baby type and have been pleased with it so with the right tweaks I think a lot of parents would happily buy this app for $1.99 or even a little more.It’s remarkable how few games on the market target the "destructive infant" demographic. That would make this app 5 stars and worth the purchase price and more. Either to make the Command combinations take a few seconds to make sure it's deliberate and also disable gestures and function keys at the top so that you don't accidentally end up on another screen. There needs to be a way to have it worry-free. ![]() Either way, I find myself intervening frequently to get the screen off the desktop, the preferences menu, the dock, etc. But even still- many of the top keys on the keyboard have a function and the mouse gestures will pull up the desktop. Unfortuantely the Command plus another key combo does happen on accident. All keys can be pushed, and none of them do anything. So baby type the mouse isn't baby proofed but the keyboard is. I like that because my son LOVES to hear the kitty cat meow but it's so hard to get it to do any one sound so I find myself hitting keys a bunch to try to get it to play the cat again.Īnother thing I mentioned before is the lack of baby proofness. So "C" would be "C" or a cat that meow's. One hting about baby type I like is that the keys are consistently one value sound, but there are multiple values for each key. Anyway, the idea is to be able to let the kid go nuts on your keyboard or with the mouse and not have to worry, but this isn't quite baby proofed. It is similar to a window's based program that I love (that was quite a bit more) called Baby Type. ![]()
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