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GeoAze - Test Your Geography SkillsLocate countries and cities on the map |
By Gabriela Ghinita, Editor, Mac Software Reviews
30th of June 2008, 18:30 GMT
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 Version reviewed: GeoAze 3.0.4
The
new version of GeoAze is finally here, with worldwide geographical
coverage, and over 3000 questions. Play the game in the language of
your choice (including Irish), or even switch languages while playing.
The maps are up to date, clear, and highly accurate, based on satellite
imagery and mountains showed in 3D.
 Features:
GeoAze
comes with four built-in levels of difficulty: Easy, Middle, Hard and
Expert. The levels of higher difficulty include the questions from the
lower ones. Thus, the Expert level contains all the questions available
in the game.
Items on the map that are not in the level of difficulty specified here
are showed in yellow to help you distinguish them, and the answers are
showed in "grayed out" text when you study the map.
 Download GeoAze
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For a high school student, Geography may seem a difficult subject due
to the large amount of information that needs to be assimilated. Unlike
many, I actually liked studying Geography and the main reason was
probably the fact that I found a logical way to memorize the names and
locations of all the countries, cities and land features. I believe
that visual learning is the most effective of all the studying methods
thanks to the better understanding level it provides.
GeoAze,
presented by the developers at Silverlight as a novel and fun game, is
actually a very useful educational tool for people who want to learn
the basics of World Geography. It will help you correctly identify the
location of various types of landmarks on the entire globe.
The Looks
GeoAze offers an easy to use and intuitive interface suitable both for children and adults. The main window of the application lets you select the type of game that you
want to play, customize the player information and choose the
geographical region for the test. There's nothing fancy about it, all
the options are presented as drop-down boxes making it easy for all the
users to focus on the functionality of the program.
The
next window is the actual game window, displaying a map of the region
you have previously selected with several objectives emphasized; these
are the locations that you have to guess and place the geographical
features correctly. The small window floating over the map window shows
the current game status, the player's name, information about the game
in progress, your partial score and the current location that you have
to find.
The Works
GeoAze acts both as a
fun, challenging Geography game and as a learning helper, giving you
the possibility to study the complete map before taking a test. The New Game
window allows you to customize all the details of your game. First, you
have to select the game difficulty, letting you choose one of the
following: Easy, Middle, Hard and Expert; the last two levels are only
available in the Pro version; therefore, you won't be able to test them
in the unregistered version.
In the next step of your game
configuration process, you can select the region that you wish to learn
about. The default region list includes all the continents and several
important countries, like Canada, France, Germany and others. For each
of the available regions, there is a different set of land features
that you can locate. To give you some examples, for Africa, you can
have a test locating countries, cities, rivers, or the more general 'Land features', 'Water features' and 'Border features' .
You can select a specific number of questions for all the games you play or check the 'use Maximum' option,
which lets you answer all the questions assigned to your category. If
you choose a number of questions smaller than the total questions
available in that category, you will still have all the features of
that type highlighted on the map.
After creating a new player or
selecting your player, you are ready to start the game. You don't have
a time limit for locating the features displayed on the map, so you can
take your time identifying the specified landmark.
If you think that you're not sufficiently well prepared for the current test, you can press the Study Map button in the left toolbar of the map window. Now, the map displays
all the geographical features in your selected game giving you the
chance to memorize them correctly. This window also enables you to view
the game statistics for your player, listing the items that you had
problems in locating; this is especially useful because it tells you
what your most frequent mistakes are, so that you can focus your
learning process on them.
An interesting feature included in the Pro version of GeoAze is the Level Editor.
Although by default the application provides a limited set of
questions, you are given the opportunity to create custom tests by
selecting items from the complete list of landmarks. Unfortunately, you
are limited to the maps and locations provided by the developers,
restricting the customization process to only a few possibilities.
The Good
GeoAze
transforms learning Geography into a fun, stimulating game which makes
young people react positively and try to achieve better results with
each test they take.
The Bad
Even though
the interface of GeoAze is well designed, it seems that the developers
at Silverlight neglected the icon of the application. Therefore, GeoAze
displays the classical 'Application' icon when installed on Leopard.
The Truth
GeoAze provides high-quality, accurate satellite
maps that represent a great addition to the usual Geography educational
tools. You can test the application yourself for free and decide after
the five runs included in the trial if GeoAze is the appropriate
educational tool for your needs.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
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