1) Blue's Clues: Blue's Alphabet Book – Game Boy Color
The absolute best meld of education and gameplay. In direct alignment with the Nickelodeon children’s program, Blue’s Clues teaches the alphabet by learning how to identify letters and their placement within a word. The gameplay is designed in a number of unique and effective ways including Blue showing you “clues” on what the letters look like by having you find an object that starts with the letter, then picking out that letter from a group of other letters, a follow-the-leader game where you follow letters and notes played on a xylophone; finding a falling leaf that’s letter matches the letter on your bag, searching for letters in alphabet soup, matching games and more. The finest quality edutainment game for any Game Boy system.
2) Disney’s Little Einsteins – Game Boy Advance
Although it was labeled with an E for Everyone rating, Little Einsteins is a fun, quality title for the Early Childhood gamer. Music, art and learning are all used by the Little Einsteins’ gang and their ship, Big Jet, as they adventure into classical works of art to find musical instruments and hidden friends. They do this by following the sounds of music from classical composers, collecting notes and more. One of the better transitions from TV show to video game.
3) Care Bears – The Care Quests – Game Boy Advance
12 Different addictive mini-games where you play various Care Bears helping their friends to have a great day. Beyond simple entertainment the game teaches memory and problem solving by having you match the right Care Bear with the toy of their wish, helping Starbuddies find love by dropping hearts on the buddies on the correct path, and getting your friends across obstacle ridden trails. The only weak game in the group is Let’s Play, a mix of Tennis and Volleyball where the gameplay is designed for a dimensional playing field, but all the graphics are in 2D, making it extremely difficult to tell where the ball is going to land.
4) Franklin the Turtle - Franklin’s Great Adventure – Game Boy Advance
Multiple mini-games linked together through the free roaming garden of Franklin’s home. As Franklin you visit your friends throughout the garden and help them in mini-games that mostly consist of cooperative gameplay similar to Lost Vikings or Shrek 2. Although the most elaborate game on this list, with rich graphics, environments and puzzles, this also is the most complicated to play and will require parent’s help. On the bright side, it does require children to think as they play, something you don’t find often enough in games for younger children.
5) Bear in the Big Blue House – Game Boy Color
You play the little bear cub Ojo exploring the Big Blue House from The Jim Henson Company television series. Each room has a resident waiting for you to play a game, most consisting of targeting games where you have to catch falling objects or aim and hit moving targets. There are two standout games Peek-A-Boo and Memory; Peek-A-Boo has you sneak Ojo to a present and unwrap it without being spotted by Bear (The problem with these gifts is that they are all empty!) and Memory is a Game Boy version of the card game Concentration where you help the otter twins Pip and Pop find their toys by uncovering cards with pictures of the toys on them and finding the matching image.
6) Koala Brothers – Outback Adventure – Game Boy Advance
A rough-around-the-edges game based on the Koala Brothers television series. 10 mini-games fill out simple gameplay that gets slightly frustrating at times due to the lack of detail in the graphics, preventing you from hitting the right marks because you can’t clearly make them out. The only educational aspect is the memory game Cold Ice Cream where you match up flavors of ice cream and toppings with customers orders; the rest are timing and matching game. One plus this title has over the others is that it’s most of all of it, including the story and instructions, are picture based, so there isn’t a lot of text that pre-readers can’t decipher.
7) Sesame Street: Elmo's 123s - Game Boy Color
It’s Elmo vs. invaders from outer space! Aliens are causing all sorts of problems for Elmo and the only way to save Sesame Street is sharpening your math skills. A series of mini-games split up by subjects: counting, multiplying, subtracting and choosing the right numbers. An extraordinarily short overall game, but the creative mix of learning math and gaming are a good match for preschoolers learning their arithmetic.
8) Sesame Street: Elmo's ABCs – Game Boy Color
Bottom of the list and bottom of the barrel in EC rated games. Although it brings education to the Game Boy Color, it doesn’t bring any fun. The menu is set up to look like a series of mini-games, but each game is basically the same only with slight variations. Elmo juggles and you need to grab the ball with the matching letter, capitalization or the missing letter from a word. Would have been best suited to be a part of a larger educational game, but with the popularity of Elmo, I guess they figured they would make more money having it as a standalone.