“Dora the Explorer” may be a far remove from Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger, but I find watching the little imp on her adventures with her simian companion, Boots, and her animated inanimate objects, backpack and map, a great relief from the demands of intellectual rigor, especially with two fingers of my favorite single-malt and a smooth Cohiba. I especially enjoy the hypnotic songs, with their trance-like repetition of key phrases, such as “I’m the map,” no doubt inspired by the serialism of John Adams. “Dora the Explorer” also educates as well as entertains, providing me with the opportunity to finally study Espanol, a language I have been needing to learn in addition to my Latin, Greek, French, German, and Russian. Finally, unlike the dusty texts of history and the desiccated artifacts of half-forgotten cultures, Dora actually and literally speaks to you! Granted, the history of recorded audio and moving pictures is still young, but even the Russian neoexpressionists or the French avant-gardists or even the Czech retro-dadaists rarely, if ever, violated the sanctity of the “fourth wall” and spoke to the audience in a truly empowering and unironic manner.

Although I obtained “Dora the Explorer” purely for my own enjoyment, I thought my two-year old daughter Europa might also appreciate the delightful and edifying experience of viewing and actively participating in Dora’s adventures. She sat through the first five minutes seemingly transfixed on the screen. After ten minutes, I saw signs of discomfort, and after fifteen, she got up, toddled over to the bookcase, and pulled down my copy of “The Riverside Shakespeare.” The weighty tome landed on the floor and opened up in the middle of “Twelfth Night.” Europa sat down in front of the text and began giggling with obvious delight. To my great horror, it appeared I had fathered a literary critic. I was heartbroken, but soon forgot my woes as Dora the Explorer embarked on yet another adventure with me, her faithful viewing companion, helping her.
Rating: 5 / 5

While the voice and graphics quality is decent, the game play is absolutely infuriating. The mini-games are extremely repetitive and have difficult to understand criteria for passing. For instance, one of the stages requires you to click to make the characters dance in time. However, the animals you are attempting to mimic move at a lightning pace while you painstakingly inch the characters arms up and down one degree at a time. Getting the timing to match the invisible metronome is frustrating at best, compounded by the long-winded instructions they repeat on every failure.

Rather than being the exception, in every stage you will learn to share the frustration as your child attempts to figure out a new eccentric game that is somehow themed around dancing, but has little educational value whatsoever. However, the difficult control mechanisms do a great job of covering up the fact this game is rather short in content and length, focusing more on poorly animated skeleton-like character jigs than educational content.

I have also purchased several other Dora titles form Atari, such as “Backpack Adventure” and “Fairytale Adventure”, and have enjoyed playing them with my daughter, so this game is definitely not representative of other Dora products. I just hope other parents can avoid the disappointment and frustration of purchasing this product.

Rating: 1 / 5