Educational Games Don't Suck

.... I still have that pirates game...

They also made a game that's about the same that takes place in the old west, and one that takes place in medevil times...

Move over Left 4 Dead, I'm installing some of my old games!

Treasure Mountain.

Because Solfegietto is badass.

I remember having all the Jumpstart games from 2nd to 6th grade - though I didn't play sixth grade much. 3rd and 4th were my favorites of the set - always was kind of sad that I never beat 4th or 5th, but now thanks to the internet I can see the endings anyways.

The Incredible Machine was always my favorite.

Treasure Mountain was always my favorite (and the only Super Solvers game I played that I actually ever beat).

Another one I liked was Eco-Saurus, where you go around this island of talking dinosaurs and recycle trash. It had synthesized voice acting and characters would occasionally tell you little Green Aesop "Did You Know?" factoids when you talked to them. Also it had talking volcanoes. I still don't know how the hell that worked.

Hm... Let's see...

• Carmen Sandiego
• Some kind of Norwegian education game where the daughter of a famed scientist got an F (or "stryk") on all of her questions on her recent test. She reprograms most of her father's robots so that they will use the scientist's time machine to go back in time and change it to her liking so that all of her tests will turn out to be the right answer no matter how wrong or how Fridge Logic they are. One robot not programmed like so meets you and enlists your help. You must go back in time and retrieve all of the robots to undo the damage. Some of these InsaneTrollLogics were Crowning Moment Of Funny though. (Especially the one that had to do with inventing pasteurizing. I laughed so hard at that one. Also, cars do not exist: People had to use pogo sticks to get anywhere.)
• Does Putt-Putt count?

edited 1st Sep '11 9:56:21 AM by Folt

The Magic School Bus series are among my favorite. They were educational and also had some great minigames that sapped up a lot of my time.

Well, except for the solar system game which instead had an entire set of platforming levels with its own set of obstacles, power-ups and other items and gravity for each of the planets + the moon...

Saturn was evil. Tiny, moving and slippery platforms (Saturn's rings are made of ice...) with bad platform detection? Perfect for the little ones! And Neptune was just weird.

Number Munchers was brilliant.

I remember playing that at school.

Oh man, I've been looking for videos of those platforming levels on You Tube. Didn't Mercury have some gigantohuge crater in it that you had to jump exactly right to cross? Or was that another level?

Ooh, I liked that one!

@Folt That sounds like Jumpstart 3rd Grade.

I remember really enjoying Word Munchers when I was a kid.

At the time, my family's computer only had DOS, so it was about the only decent game we had. (No, I'm not that old, but the computer was.)

*7

Oh, man. I was on Youtube looking up the Magic School Bus soundtrack and ran into the soundtrack for the Ocean game.

It sent me into nostalgia insanity.

The track I remember most is this one, but listening to the music again after years I've got to say most of the music in that game was downright phenomenal.

That fish game kind of spooked me when I was a kid. I can't remember why. I had that game, but it stopped working... we sold it, for some reason. In retrospect, it probably still worked, we just did something wrong...

Oh, holy crap, I just remembered: Mario Is Missing on DOS.

It was slow as shit, probably due to being a bad port on a machine that was considered low-end before Windows 95 was released, but I wanted to stick through all the slow-arse animations because 'ey, it's Luigi! It took my siblings and I years to figure out what we had to do, though, and I think we just narrowed it down to "go to various cities, find stuff, answer questions correctly, get Yoshi, get back to the castle."

oh god, my childhood

@Giant Robots: YES! THAT'S THE ONE! IT WAS AWESOME!

So... you liked Mario Is Missing?

edited 18th Oct '11 4:46:48 AM by Folt

I loved these games so much. I had both Logical Journey Of The Zoombinis and the sequel, the Clue Finders and Jump Start games 3 through 6, and a great deal of the Carmen Sandiago Games.

Thigpen was the best. I still do that Yaaaay YOU! thing she does with the pompoms from Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiago. And Jump Start third grade through fifth were fantastic (I was never too keen on the sixth) And the Clue Finders gang was great too.

Dawwh. I feel all nostalgic now.

edited 18th Oct '11 5:40:25 AM by Nicknacks

~JUMP! JUMP! JUMPSTART 1ST GRADE! JUMP! JUMP! JUMPSTART 1ST GRADE! JUMP! JUMP! JUMPSTART 1ST GRADE! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! JUMPSTART 1ST GRADE! JUMP! JUMP! JUMPSTART 1ST GRADE! JUMP! JUMP! JUMPSTART 1ST GRADE! JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! Reading, writing, it's just so exciting!...~

So yeah, JumpStart was awesome (especially 3rd Grade), although later games seemed to be a bit too ahead of the learning curve (i.e. the lessons present in 5th and 6th Grade are usually not known by a 5th or 6th grader at that time). As was Carmen Sandiego.

Gizmos and Gadgets was just plain dope. How many educational games are there that let you put rainbow decals on blimps?

I'll admit, my perception of the game's a little rose-tinted since I played it when I was 9 or so...but when I beat Morty in that blimp race, that was an achievement — I felt like I could take on college right then and there. Unfortunately, we stopped playing all the cool games and started focusing on "how to type" lessons in some colorless program almost until elementary-school graduation.

I can't help but wonder what computer labs are like nowadays. Hopefully, kids are having as much fun as I did back in the days of this old fogey.

Sigh.. is 23 too old to play kid games? Wonder if there's some caual games like the minigames in Jumpstart?

Chex Quest was a fun little Doo M WAD, that just barely scraped by as edutainment by changing the medkits to healthy foods.

edited 28th Dec '13 8:49:23 PM by maxwellelvis

Math Quest with Aladdin and Reading Quest with Aladdin were really funny back when I was little.

Only games I remember back when floppy disks were still a thing were Number Munchers and this Carmen Sandiego game, that involved a bunch of trivia robots and this one game where you had to get close to said robots without their searchlight hitting you. Every other step you made put up a barrier that shielded you from getting sent back.

Nowadays though during my seasonal shift, when someone asked for an educational game on any of the systems, from DS to 360, of all things, I just give an very audible chuckle of derision. They instantly take it to mean there aren't any and/or any good ones.

I remember there was this Amazon rain forest exploration game I used to play all the time as a kid. Can't remember the name of it, only that you went on an expedition down the Amazon river, and if you weren't prepared you could do die from disease or starvation or something. You had to stop every now and them to fish, or take pictures of wildlife, and every now and again some event would happen showing off the history and culture of those living in the Amazon. At the end a giant, disembodied jaguar head would grade your performance, and I was always super mad because I ended up with a low score, since all I ever did was take pictures of animals. I really wish I could remember the name of that game...

My school also had a typing game to teach us how to use a keyboard, but it was styled as a sort of RPG, where we had to beat enemies by typing at them before they could attack. That was always really neat.

The grandaddy of education games during my childhood, though, all centered around Pajama Sam.

Hey, his games were educational! They taught me that if I eat too much junk food, the beans will all go on strike and the bean ambassador will get stuck on the roof of the office building.

edited 30th Dec '13 1:03:58 AM by NamePending