Disney's Winnie the Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventures (PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance)

In DISNEY'S WINNIE THE POOH'S RUMBLY TUMBLY ADVENTURES (for Sony's PlayStation 2, and Nintendo's GameCube and GameBoy Advance), Ubisoft provides hours of interactive fun with Winnie the Pooh and his friends. To make it accessible for even the youngest gamer (ages 4 to 6), the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions offer a separate Junior Mode. Kids join Pooh on five adventures that recall events surrounding the birthdays of Piglet, Tigger, Roo, Eeyore, and Pooh. In each adventure, the goal is to accomplish tasks to help make a special birthday event occur.

The console version features Junior Mode and five multiplayer Mini games. Junior Mode opens a special area of the Hundred Acre Wood where there is no gaming objective, just lots of sparkling objects to explore. By interacting with these sparkling objects, preschoolers trigger special animations, including Pooh floating by with a balloon or Piglet petting a frog.

The console version has many kid-smart features: The game cleverly blocks paths in and out of unnecessary scenes so that kids don't spend too much time wandering aimlessly in the Wood. In every scene there are special honey pots to find that come in handy whenever Pooh needs to lure away a swarm of bees. And the frequent autosave feature makes it easy to pick up and put down. The GameBoy Advance version follows the same storyline but is more complicated and requires a lot of reading, so it's best for ages 7 and 8.

This is a gentle game with no fighting or violence that helps kids learn how to solve simple logic exercises. One thing mars this otherwise child-friendly game: At various times, Heffalumps and Woozles chase your character. If a Heffalump catches your character, it will look down from a great height and bellow loudly. Pooh and his friends act scared, and your little ones might be scared too -- to avoid it, choose the Junior Mode.