The Wiggles: Wiggly Party should be better than it is. The featured games suffer from lack of originality, and once children cycle through the puzzles and the "spot the difference" pictures, they repeat the exact same puzzles if they want to continue. As a result, replay value suffers.

Children are invited to choose someone to play with—Anthony, Murray, Greg, Jeff, and friends each lead to an activity. Kids can play tic-tac-toe, match picture cards to sound cards, create printable greeting cards with Wiggles graphics, drag puzzle pieces into place, watch the pirate dance by clicking on his "magic buttons", spot the difference in two almost-identical pictures, and color templates. 

Kids can also watch any of 3 Wiggles video clips, or listen to songs by clicking on the Wiggly Juke Box.   

The activities range from dull to mildly interesting. Yes, many of them are tried-and-true, but matching games and simple tic-tac-toe are too prevalent in children's software. We look for games that offer more originality or pleasing new spins to old favorites. We enjoyed the jigsaw activity, which included puzzles framed as circles and stars as well as traditional squares/rectangles. Children can cycle through the activity's puzzles, which become more challenging as they go along, but there were too few unique puzzles to hold interest beyond the first play session.

The matching game involves matching picture cards with sound cards. The exact phrase uttered by each character card is not repeated in its sound card match, so children have to recognize the character's voice in order to find the right match.

The pirate activity held testers' interest for less than 30 seconds. Children press different buttons on the pirate's vest and the pirate dances in different ways. The greeting card creator activity and the coloring activity are overdone in children's software, and these ones don't offer anything special, nor do they feature much variety in terms of selection of stamps, for example.

Our favorite activity of the bunch is the "spot the difference" game in which children click on the discrepancies (an extra leaf on a flower or a different design on a guitar, for example) between two near-identical pictures. Even so, testers cycled through the pictures rather quickly and had no motivation to return to the activity because they would then be repeating the same pictures.

All in all, this program was disappointing. There is nothing here to offend parents, and children can play the game intuitively. However, there is not enough content, and what is there is lacking in originality and replay value.

Pros: Some activities have some merit.

Cons: Lacking originality and replay value.

Our Rating:   C-

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Reviewed July 2004

The Wiggles
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