Edutainment games of my childhood
I grew up surrounded by computers. My father is an unbelievable Amiga fanboy. We must have owned over 5 or 6 Amiga’s, The Amiga 1200 being my very own home computer and my beast of choice when it came to gaming at a young age. Everyone talks about DOS gaming in their childhood. I had this gem whenever I booted my machine, with its accompaning clicking sounds.
I had cases full of floppy disks that my dad bought me off eBay, full of games released for the Amiga. As a kid, I had a plethora of games to choose from and just picked whatever had my fancy. Many of the games I played were not per se designed for kids, especially non native English speaking kids. I remember fumbling through games like Monkey Island 1 & 2 and Hook, without fully understanding the intricacies of the language. The insult swordfighting for example, was just a prompt/reply matching algorithm I noted down in order to quickly get past the bits I didn’t actually understand.
However, that’s not what I wanted to touch upon. I wanted to take the time going through the games of my childhood that were actually targetted at children and educational. This was very slim pickings indeed. You had some bare bones DOS games back in primary school, like hangman and other classics that were just meh. But I do still have some very fond memories of certain games.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Upon researching this, I didn’t even realize the franchise had so many games in its repertoire, let alone that it was still going! I’ll have to do some more digging and see if there are any noteworthy entries that are worth playing which I’ve missed.
In any case, Carmen Sandiego is a criminal mastermind and has a small army of henchmen that travel around the world, steal an item and it’s your job as an Interpol agent to track the culprit down and apprehend them. The gameplay is fairly easy, you have 3 locations to visit per city, you get clues about the culprit and clues about their destination.
Some of these clues might be the colors of the flag, the currency of the country or something about its history. As a kid, in the nineties, internet wasn’t a thing yet. So I played this game next to the large encyclopedias my dad owned. Every single city has 3-4 linking connections to choose from. The world map doesn’t show countries to visit, oh no, just cities. I must’ve been 8 or 10 years old and knowing Montreal is a city in Canada or that Port Moresby lies in Papua New Guinea isn’t common knowledge. So every little bit of info I got from the game, I had to look up in actual paper encyclopedia. They were usually divided in several books, some editions (including the one we owned) had over 20 volumes. So whenever I set out to play this game, I was surrounded by several books flipped open on different pages with the necessary info in order to solve the clues the game gave.
The game is now marked as abandonware and can be freely played online.
Rayman Junior
I didn’t own this game. I know it by the title Rayman Junior, but the most common release title seems to be Amazing learning games with Rayman. A friend of mine owned this, when he booted the game up, I was immediately enthralled by it. It had platforming, one of my favourite genres as a child, and maths?
This was such a blast to play, levels were themed to a certain topic, some would be vocabulary or grammar-based, others might include mathematical equations. Whatever it was, I was just the right age for it to be somewhat challenging but not too hard or too easy to breeze through.
Not only that, but the platforming in the game wasn’t that easy either, as I recall. There were parts where you would sit on a sliding platform, and as the platforming kept moving in the same direction, you were forced to pick the correct branching path based on the correct spelling of a spoken word.
My sister owns a medium-sized retro collection of games of the Playstation era, and I’m interested in finding out if this game is one of them. Replaying it and finding out if I ever made it to the end, would be fun!
Spy Fox in “Dry Cereal”
By this time, we owned a Personal Computer with one of the most atrocious OS releases Microsoft ever cooked up, Windows Me. This was the only computer that was hooked up to the internet at the time. So it was a shared computer for the whole family. My sister and I would regularly get into scrapes about who had access to the computer.
If I remeber correctly we got this game on a CD as a free giveaway. I can’t recall the specifics very clearly, but I’m sure it doesn’t really matter. I think it was the first time I was exposed to a point-and-click adventure game that was actually meant for children, instead of adults or young-adults. Before, I just played LucasArts point-and-click games and later moved on to Myst, Riven, and Zork in play sessions with my dad.
The game is set in a world where no humans exist and is populated by sentient, talking animals. You’re a fox and a spy, you are helped by Monkeypenny and professor Quack, clever James Bond references that as a kid went over my head, but as an adult had me chuckling. And I guess, it’s that kind of vision Ron Gilbert put into his line of games that were meant for kids. He realized the games would be played be children mainly, but their parents would be there along side them. Putting in the work to add in these kinds of puns (in naming as well as in-game jokes) means adults would be having a good time as well!
I have only played the first game as a child, and am interested in revisting this and giving the other 2 games a try as well. Filling up my backlog of games even more. Once I’m retired in some thirty odd years, I’ll finally have the time to complete all of those games.
The Incredible Machine 2
Once again a game I didn’t own and knew under a different title. Every sunday I would stay over at friends of my dad as they went out to play tennis. They had two children as well about my age and were a French-speaking family. So naturally, the game was also in French, titled Les Incroyables Machines du Professeur Tim. My French was okay at the time, I knew enough to communicate on a basic level, understand the prompts of the game and solve the puzzles.
The premise is seemingly simple, you get a level setup with different immovable objects, a goal and a toolbox with moveable parts. This can be anything from scissors, to lasers and anything in between. It’s your task to achieve that goal, with some or all of the parts provided.
Every time I solved a level, I felt like a genius, finding the right solution with all of the chaos going on. At times you get the solution by accident, or when handling basketballs, you get a lucky bounce because of the placement of a certain part and end up solving a level without actually planning for it. Those moments are what I remember most fondly about this game.
As a child, building Rube Goldberg machines are a hard thing to do, you’re usually limited to certain objects you’re “allowed” to use (I know what I’m doing, mom!) and playing this really scratched that itch. Complex mechanics working together to achieve a desired result. I’m interested if there are any modern games with the same feel as this that are worth trying…
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