Monday, February 12, 2007
Why would anyone steal a 10,000-year-old egg??
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?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
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.
Post a Comment