This might strike you as an odd first follow-up topic from our last show, but our last story was about a Dr. Who game that helps teach children to code. This had me thinking about some of the edutainment games of our youth that maybe inspired us to learn, or perhaps create games or even program. I was reminded a lot in the Dr. Who game about a game I played in my youth called Rocky's Boots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots Basically you build machines that involve activating a boot to kick a ball, but you used a series of logic oriented questions to do it such as AND gates, OR and so on and so on. This game reminded me of some other edutainment games created by the same company around the same time, but this was always one of my favorites. Maybe it was a gateway drug to the amazing "The Incredible Machine" years later, I dunno
What are some of your obscure favorite edutainment games from your youth that shaped you today? I'm sure a lot of people know Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, Number Munchers... but what else should be added to this list?
I can think of a few others from my youth:
Cave of the Word Wizard - This game was kinda creepy because you were a child in a cave trying to not let your flashlight run out. I guess if it did something would happen to you like the plot of "The Descent" ... anyway, this Wizard would show up and actually SAY words that you would have to then spell. Yes, SAY. It was a very early use of speech technology on these early computers. For that reason as I'm sure you can imagine, sometimes that wizard was really damn hard to understand. I remember the manual came with a list of all the words available in the game, and I never understood why it was there, but in retrospect, it was probably to help parents who wanted to play with their kids who needed a word repeated lol.
Weather Tamers - Oh man this game might have single handedly inspired me to want to be a weatherman hahha. This game was cool you had a giant map, and various cities would request different weather conditions, so you could like, change the high pressure and low pressure and other elements to try and generate the weather people wanted. Not only did you learn geography but you'd learn about like what causes thunderstorms and tornadoes and stuff. And the little graphics of people cheering as a thunderstorm was going thru their neighborhood was kinda funny.
Math Busters - My memory is super fuzzy on this one but it was rad, you would have to create math problems to generate a particular number that the machine wanted. You'd find the numbers and the math signs in trees. The platforming in the game was a little wonky though and I remember I'd always be grabbing the wrong damn number (in which case, you have to fix your math problem by doing extra addition or subtraction or something). Definitely a good mix of platforming and learning though... especially for an old game.
Okay like I seriously picked all Commodore 64 games but did you expect anything less from me? That's what I had as a kid anyway! How about you guys, what were some edutainment games that shaped YOU?
