Leap Frog Leapster

Leap Frog has a long experience in the creation of educational goods ever since 1995. Most of Leap Frog’s products are in fact educational. Now, they have chosen to enter the handheld video game market with their latest innovation, the Leapster.

With such illustrious competitors such as the Nintendo DS and the Playstation PSP, the Leapster has not been able to gather much momentum in the handheld video game market. This is because the Leapster has been aiming at the younger section of the market, aged 4-10 years. Their games are normally found in the toy section rather than in the electronics section.

Despite its weaker market position, the Leapster can still provide some valuable lessons to the two industry leaders. The Leapster comes with games already pre-installed on it. The first game is inspired from Frogger, a famous arcade game of the eighties. It involves a rabbit jumping from log to log in a flowing river. A marked difference between Frogger and the Leapster game is that the player has to make the rabbit land on certain letters and numbers on the logs. My personal feeling is that the game is very educational. My three year old son is already getting the basic concept of multiplications. Even though, multiplication itself may be a little difficult for his age but I think that he is getting familiar with the numbers and letters.

The next game is a kind of drawing game. Some pictures are included which the child can colour up using the digital pen provided. The child has the freedom to embellish the pictures. For example, ghosts can be made to sing “Boo-boo-boo-boo” as if they were Elvis. It is quite unbelievable, really.

Sadly, the Leap Frog Leapster is certainly the preserve of children only. Adults or teenagers are unlikely to play its games. My kid is nevertheless very much attached to it and can barely stop playing it. I cannot say for sure that this is entirely a good thing but I frequently confiscate it when he misbehaves and reward him with it when he is nice.

It is a very nice companion for kids on long trips as well. The Leapster can be bought for just $59.99 on the Leap Frog site with the cartridges costing between $12 and 20.

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