In a true measure of how little I do, I have been obsessed with playing video games lately. I've actually put down the Karaoke Revolution microphone in favor of something more old school: educational games on my Apple IIe emulator. I beat Carmen Sandiego (above) yesterday and am working on Oregon Trail. I remember how hard it was to beat Oregon Trail, especially since you only had one period to do so. On computer lab days, I used to plot how I could quickly start up the game, saving the precious minutes that I could use to win the game. I think I only did so a few times...perhaps I wasn't meant to be a pioneer!
By the way, a bunch of people have mocked me for remembering a game called Spellavator, saying it didn't exist. Well, Wikipedia has proved me wrong! Mock no more. Perhaps I remember more of these games since I did go to school in Minnesota and they were made byMECC--the Minnesota Education Computer Consortium. Pretty cool to know we were so progressive in computer education! (by the way, I'm pretty sure that video shows kids playing LogoWriter. That was a cool game.)
By the way, what was up with Odell Down Under? I thought it was the most boring game ever, and I only ever tried to play it when I couldn't get a computer that had Oregon Trail or Amazon Trail. Fish eats fish, osprey eats fish, blah blah blah.
Did anyone EVER finish Amazon Trail? What were your favorite computer lab games?
1 comment:
Geez, I played computer games in the Dark Days (TM), in the days of PEEKs and POKEs and learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 and PET (with cassette drives!) I was born too late; a few years earlier and I could have been a bazillionaire with the growth in home computers and needed software....
There's a typical '80s movie called WarGames. I forget what the real name was, but there was a BASIC "find your way through the castle" game that I renamed Falken's Maze. I'm not sure if there was really a point to it, though. You just wandered through the castle, collecting items and battling creatures and hoping you didn't get killed or transformed.
For arcade games, I was real good on Tempest, dropping many a quarter in and eventually getting to start on the higher two-digit levels. I also liked Rampage, where the apes beat up the city (and sometimes each other if you didn't like your opponent!)
I also had an Atari 2600. If we had the rapid fire device plugged in you could cheat at Asteroids and just hold down the button while spinning around in a circle. Combat, though simple, was good. Space Shuttle was too complicated for me to get the hang of.
I have the CD game of Where in the World... now I'll have to install it on my home computer.
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