Hot Wheels Tattoo Designer

Reviewed by Carol Welch
Published by Mattel Media

Age Group: Age 4 to 8, Age 8 and Up
Type: Art/Creativity
Price: $30

Description:

Hot Wheels Tattoo Designer lets kids create custom temporary tattoos in a desktop publishing style program. Lots of cool Hot Wheels graphics are included, or kids can create their own by changing colors, applying special effects, using Hot Wheels stamps or importing graphics from hard drive, scanner or digital camera.

Features:

  • Hot Wheels graphics
  • 13 special effects
  • Customizing capabilities
  • Over 100 stamps
  • Includes 3 sheets of tattoo paper (refills are available on-line)
  • Includes 1 Hot Wheels race car

Technical Aspects:

This software was installed on a Pentium 200, with 64MB RAM and a 20x CD-ROM. It requires a minimum of 10MB of free disk space. The program installed and ran with no problems. The graphics are very good. It works in 256 color, but the animated sequence at the opening of the program needs 16 Million to really look its best. There are no audio directions, but plenty of car shop sound effects like tires squalling and tools clanking (which can be annoying to a mother trying to work in the vicinity). The DTP layout is easy for children to understand and manipulate, and hearing-impaired children shouldn't have a problem with this program.

Report and Conclusions:

First of all, this program is not for everyone. If you cringe at the thought of your little ones running around with tattoos of chains, snakes or skulls on their arms - this is definitely one to pass up. There are cool graphics like cars, flags, Hot Wheels logos, and the usual flames, but there is also an entire section of "gross" tattoos that may be offensive to many parents. Of course, my 8 year-old and 4 year-old boys loved them (so did Dad). This title is much more likely to appeal to boys than to girls, and I expect that teenagers would enjoy it as well.

The program itself is very well designed. It is easy to use, bug-free, and fun. I even thought it was a great introduction into desktop publishing. But, since the entire purpose of this product is to create tattoos, I cannot recommend buying it because, quite frankly, the tattoos are awful. The kids and I were having a great time designing the tattoos. They printed very well, but we could not figure out how to put them on the kids' skin. The onscreen instructions for applying the tattoos were not very clear. I finally called Mattel tech support. The gentleman was eager to help me, but was even more eager to sell me a copy of Hot Wheel Stunt Track (which I did not appreciate). His directions for applying the tattoos were not correct, but between what he said and what the instructions said, I finally puzzled it out. The tattoos are applied with an adhesive that makes them more like a bandage than a tattoo. They do look really cool; but after 2 hours my oldest proclaimed that his tattoos were "bugging him" and peeled them off. My youngest left them on all day, fearing that they would hurt when pulled off. They did.

The tattoos do work as decals for Hot Wheels cars, but they are very difficult to apply, and only the stamps are small enough to fit on the cars. My children have given up on the idea of wearing the tattoos, and our new mission is to find printable sticker pages that will work with this program so that we might make further use of it. It would be a good program if only the tattoos were better.




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