Title: Dr. Seuss Band
Developer: Oceanhouse Media
Compatibility: iPad / iPhone / iPod touch // iOS 3.2
Size: 42.9 MB
Description: If this were 5 years ago, we could call this "Baby's First Rock Band" or "Baby's First Tap Tap [Whatever]" and lots of people would recognize the reference to the games that gave players points for tapping correct "notes" in time with the song.
This app is one of the many Seussian apps from Oceanhouse but doesn't really use the famous Seuss words or drawings (the songs are totally made up to Seuss' book titles). The user gets to customize wonderfully goofy instruments (think trumpets with all sorts of crazy bagpipe-like attachments) and, once set, taps notes that correlate to a C major scale in time with the lighted pulses coming down from the top of the screen.
You can change the difficulty level -- the harder the difficulty, the more notes you need to tap. You can select a number of different songs, but some instruments and some songs are locked -- you need to achieve a high-enough score to unlock them (or you can just be lazy and pay via an in-app purchase).
While the app offers free play, we've never bothered to try it -- aside from the goofy sound and bright colors, there's no advantage to this over, say, Garageband (which we also have installed). Also, until I was prepping this review I hadn't realized that you could also play this on an iPhone or iPod touch. I have no idea why you'd ever want to do that on such a (comparatively) tiny screen.
As musical games go, this is reasonably diverting. Once mastered, it probably won't hold much allure, but I think it could take your kids a long time to do that...
Age Range: 2 through 7
Price: $0.99 (plus in-app purchases -- $7.99 unlocks everything)
Link: iTunes
