Kutoka Introduces New Title In The Mia Collection-Mia Reading: The Bugaboo Bugs!

PRLog (Press Release) – Feb 19, 2008 – MONTREAL- For Kutoka this is the year of the mouse.  Mia, the mouse and star of their award-winning edutainment software series will be celebrating ten years of adventures and learning. To kick off the celebration, Kutoka is launching a new title, Mia Reading: The Bugaboo Bugs!, into their popular line of fun and educational software for children.

Targeted at five to nine year olds, and developed by experts in education and in multimedia, The Bugaboo Bugs! focuses on literary skills by combining an exciting adventure with engaging educational activities that are in sync with the educational curriculum from kindergarten to grade three.

The Bugaboo Bugs! is about some incredibly troublesome bugs! Mia lives in a charming Victorian house where her family has lived for generations. The house has recently been invaded by pests—the Bugaboos.  These disrespectful, noisy and uncivilized bugs are going to attract the attention of the humans, and if they are noticed, the exterminators will be called and everyone will be put out on the street! The Bugaboos must go! And Mia needs the player’s help to find a way to get them to stay out of site.

ENGAGING EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES
Mia’s Reading Adventure has been designed to support a school’s curriculum from kindergarten to grade three, and includes 12 exciting literacy skills activities each with four distinct age-appropriate levels of difficulty. Topics covered include associating images to words, punctuation, phonics, rhymes, spelling, sentence structure, vocabulary, reading comprehension, word recognition, verb tense, adverbs, following instructions, and much more!  There is an easy to consult progress report and The Bugaboo Bugs! educational activities are seamlessly integrated into the story.  There is also a feature that allows the player to go directly to the activities. But of course, it is the adventure that makes a Mia game so special!

NOW ON DVD-ROM!
DVD technology allows more content on a disk so The Bugaboo Bugs! really shows off the beauty of Mia's World with bigger and higher quality graphics than previously possible. The 3D world is filled with endearing characters and is seen from the perspective of a little mouse, who is the heroine of these adventures. Cute, funny and full of great ideas, Mia has always been great company for children, generation after generation.

The Bugaboo Bugs! is a brand new adventure with plenty of funny story twists, lots of surprise animations, fun educational activities and tons of places to visit. “All of this adds up to more play time!" said Richard Vincent, Kutoka's Creative Director. “In The Bugaboo Bugs!, Kutoka is revisiting the subject of its very first Mia game — The Search for Grandma's Remedy — reading. Now the original Mia Reading title that we launched ten years ago, which has been played by over a million children around the globe, will take a well deserved retirement and will be replaced by this new title", Vincent added.

PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
Mia Reading: The Bugaboo Bugs! is available on a hybrid DVD-ROM for Windows and  Macintosh and is available at TOYS 'R US, The Apple Stores, and other fine toys and computer stores with a suggested retail price of $24.99 (USD) and is aimed at five to nine year olds.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Windows XP (sp2), 2000 (sp4), VISTA; Processor: Pentium III - 1Ghz; RAM: 512 MB; Video & Sound: DirectX 9 compatible; DVD-ROM Drive: 4X; Hard Disk Space: 1.2 GB.

Macintosh OS X, 10.4, 10.5; Processor: G4 - 1Ghz; RAM: 512 MB;
Video & Sound: Standard Macintosh; DVD-ROM Drive: 4X; Hard Disk Space: 1.2 GB.

ABOUT THE MIA COLLECTION
There are five titles in the Mia software collection, four learning adventures and a creativity tool called Click & Create. The four learning adventures cover math, science, reading and an introduction to foreign languages (French and Spanish). This multi award-winning series is available is over 40 countries in 14 different languages.