Children's puzzle game with bear mascot
 

Hi, I am looking for a game I played as a kid (so around late eighties, early nineties) that was a children's puzzle kind of game. It was basically a bunch of mini-games: one where you would have to correctly identify shapes, another of concentration-type (memory-type) where you flip cards and try to pair them, another where you could make objects "bigger" and "smaller" with the game correspondingly saying this. This game was known to me and my siblings simply as "The bear game" since there was sort of a bear mascot that was common to each of the mini games. It ran on an IBM compatible 286 computer in DOS and when I played there was no color; only shades or grey (but this is possibly the computer's limitation, rather than the game's). The speech, such as when you would complete a puzzle, came through the PC speaker.

Sounds like an early Stickybear game. Unfortunately, as with a lot of edutainment, the exact release history of the series is a bit obscured - to the degree that I'd appreciate you confirming (if possible) whether or not it featured Stickybear before I try to figure out what particular release it was.

Nice find; unfortunately not the one I'm looking for. Rather than being cartoony, as Stickybear seems to be, the one I'm looking for looked more like it was constructed with simple polygons (rectangles, circles, squares) on a computer. I'm no artist but I've attached an image to try to give a general idea of what I mean. The bear had a dark grey and a light grey and had a face. I've omitted the face because I don't remember exactly it's style and wouldn't want to mislead based on this, but the face too seemed like it was made with a computer image editing program; probably mostly with something like a line tool. Also, if it helps, the bear was not a static image but rather would move around in some games or if it spoke its face would change a little as well. There was a mini game where you could make shapes (circles, triangles, rectangles) "bigger" and "smaller". The idea I'm trying to get across is that the bear's construction from simple polygons facilitated simple transformations being done to it; such as walking by moving the legs or having it be a different size based on how much free space there was on the screen in a given mini game.

http://morath.comxa.com/bear.gif

Also, something else that might help; there was a distinctive jingle that would play after completing a puzzle and before returning to the mini game menu; I made a recording of it: http://morath.comxa.com/Record3.mid I recorded it in MIDI to approximate how it might sound on the PC speaker.

Hmm, could be http://www.mobygames.com/game/putt-p...-activity-pack or http://www.mobygames.com/game/fatty-bears-funpack ?

I'm surprised how close fatty bear is to my description (going by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibfEGWJjqaE) without being the game I'm looking for. The graphics in the game I'm looking for were more crude than those in fatty bear. I don't think there was a reversi mini-game. Here are the mini-games I remember (there may have been a couple more):

• A game of concentration (or memory) where you try to pair cards by flipping them over two at a time
• A game where you would make shapes bigger and smaller
• A game where you would have to find the correct shape; as in find the triangle or find the circle

You could vary the difficulty of at least some of the games; fon instance the game of concentration's difficulty could vary by starting with a small (perhaps 6) to large (perhaps 40) number of cards.

Okay, I've got another proposal, although I don't currently have solid proof that the game came out for DOS. It definitely came out for Amiga and apparently the Atari ST and Applie II as well, so I don't think a forgotten PC version is out of the question.

"Ted E. Bear Presents First Shapes"

http://hol.abime.net/3784
http://www.elisoftware.org/index.php...Canada_Release

I'm not saying this is it for sure, but it could add another point of calibration, so please check it out and think about what an old B&W DOS version might be like...

Bingo! :max: Thanks Megaten and The Fifth Horseman!