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Let's go back to our school days and think of those games designed to educate as much as entertain. One major publisher of these games was Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation, which made Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. You can play some of these games on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/software?and%5B%5D=creator%3A%22minnesota+educational+computing+corporation%22&sort=-downloads&page=6. While most edutainment games were on Mac and PC, there was also a brightly colored console released called the Pico Sega, that had Genesis guts and was used to make educational games for the 6 and younger market. Here's what it looked like. There were different pages in the book-like cartridge.  The title screen:  Inside the book, there were various pages that you could tap on with the pen to go various activities. Scene in the book:  On the screen:  In the town scene, if you tapped on the pickle car, it went to a driving game:  Each book ended on a simple digital coloring page  I'd love to show you more of the Pico Sega, but my pen doesn't work anymore.
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Jun 22, 2020 05:09
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Ah MECC  Back in the day I had the SNES version of Mario is Missing:  It wasn't much of a game: You just run around a bunch of cities across the world killing enemies hoping one drops a macguffin for you to turn in and get rewarded with a digitized photo of some landmark or piece of artwork. I think there was also a minor trivia element too but I don't recall for sure. Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Bowser are haphazardly duct taped into the whole thing to move more units. The most notable thing about it is probably the MS-DOS version of the game giving us the image of "Weegee" that became a meme a while back. The SNES version lifted sprites from Super Mario World so it ended up being a lot more boring in comparison.
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Jun 23, 2020 07:23
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The Super Solvers games were great, especially Gizmos & Gadgets.  
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Jun 23, 2020 08:11
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The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is excellent and you can get it on Steam.
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Jun 23, 2020 09:05
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The good old BBC Micro was often the only computer that schools in the 80s and 90s would buy, and there would be an enormous box of floppies that us kids could sift through and play if we were good. My very first exposure to videogames was in 1988, playing Granny's Garden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKrUvQHeyFw
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Jun 23, 2020 23:54
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The Kins posted:The Super Solvers games were great, especially Gizmos & Gadgets. Goddamn loved Super Solvers as a kid, my personal favourite was Ancient Empires. Although, I was terrible at it and couldn't beat it until adulthood. I am really bad at platformers.
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Jun 24, 2020 00:53
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Zoombinis is the one I remember most, but the last one I ever played was probably 3rd grade Clue Finders.  Wikipedia posted:In The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: The Mystery of Mathra a great city was built 1000 years ago in the Numerian rainforest until a monster named Mathra invaded. After Mathra was captured, the Numerians abandoned their city and sealed the entrance and hid the two halves of the key in the far corners of the rainforest - one in the Monkey Kingdom and the latter in the Goo Lagoon. Recently animals have started to disappear in the rainforest once again, along with Joni's uncle, Dr. Pythagoras. Mr. Limburger flies the ClueFinders in his airplane and briefs them on the events going on. The ClueFinders set off to find the lost doctor, animals, and the keys to the Lost Numerian City. Evidence that they find, however, suggests that there is more to those disappearances than the 1000-year-old monster as well as a sinister plot behind it. It was a very weird game, but I sure felt like a badass when I beat it as a mere 1st grader 
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Jun 24, 2020 10:21
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I still fire up reader Rabbit's preschool occasionally, I think it's still enjoyable. One that's less shameful to bring up is the deluxe Carmen Sandiego games on cd (the versions with the cell phone), always nice to play, too bad where in time didn't get the same treatment, but it did get a neat adventure game.
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Jul 2, 2020 03:26
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My brother and I used to rent Sesame Street 123 for NES even though we were too old for Sesame Street and couldn't possibly benefit from the educational aspect of it. It was just fun to play...
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Jul 2, 2020 05:41
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The games the school computer had when I was a tiny kid were Myst and hyperman, guess which one I beat (I still don't know how to finish hyperman). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcBjHZi57K4 Also these ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB8NCSRszqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7lSCS8nnYk
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Jul 3, 2020 13:19
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEymDknkk5I i played this one in school, "the caves of oberon," you explore caves and solve math puzzles. i played it on the MSX though not a C64 i remember my school also had a game i forgot the name of where you basically managed a human being's life like in the sims, but with much simpler graphics. like you had to wake up, brush your teeth, wash your hands, eat something etc and if you did things in the wrong order youd get a game over. i just made the character take poo poo over and over again and never wash his hands, you'd see him sitting on the toilet with his pants down
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Jul 3, 2020 13:56
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Despite being very concerned with academic achievement my parents mercifully never mandated educational videogames and let me play Final Fight and A Link to the Past instead of Mario is Missing. The first and one of the more enjoyable edutainment games I remember playing out of necessity in kindergarten was Sierra's "Mixed Up Mother Goose" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZSW2kIupck It was a pretty rudimentary adventure game based on the nursery rhymes of Mother Goose and evidently stuck pretty closely to the o.g. versions because I recall "the Old Woman in the Shoe" being depicted as a literal child abuser hitting her litany of children with a spoon one by one as they file into their stinky foot smelling home 
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Jul 4, 2020 00:51
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BhindiBhaji Boogie posted:Despite being very concerned with academic achievement my parents mercifully never mandated educational videogames and let me play Final Fight and A Link to the Past instead of Mario is Missing. The first and one of the more enjoyable edutainment games I remember playing out of necessity in kindergarten was Sierra's "Mixed Up Mother Goose" Whoa old Untitled Goose Game (1987) sure is a trip! I remember playing this on some sort of IBM PC back in the day. Skip the video to about 6:30 to see the assembly line child abuse you mentioned.
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Jul 4, 2020 03:46
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Was watching a streamer with a friend tonight play a bunch of edutainment and edutainment adjacent games when my friend mentioned a game I genuinely thought I must have imagined because I could not remember what it was called. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-NAVhjIS9k I could only remember that it involved a dog and walking around and getting trapped in weird cubes when the enemies attacked you. Probably a terrible game but I'm just kind of amazed i finally found an answer after all these years.
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Jul 13, 2020 07:15
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I was thinking back to games I played on the pre-OSX Mac my mom had at work (elementary school teacher). Reading Maze was my favorite but I know I never truly completed it. I've attempted get it working to show you, but the archive of it seems to be corrupt. Another favorite of mine I don't remember the name of it. It was a math game by MECC, where you did a series of problems at a give difficulty level and were rewarded with a series of very short animations.
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Jul 14, 2020 15:19
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Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Do you want to know something? I still have never completed it. Zeluth fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 14:09
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Zeluth posted:Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Sure does! My school used it for 2?-5 graders. We then switched to a basketball themed typing teacher for middle school that felt a lot less effective. Instead of starting with the home row, it started with f,r,j,u two letters per index finger. We weren't supposed to do the two last games in the lesson, so I don't think we ever moved on from those letters. Back on the Mac at my mom's school, I think it had a track and field themed typing game. I never really played it, as it was hard to quit out of. I'm not kidding.
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Jul 15, 2020 16:21
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Learning is NOT fun, OP. These games that try to trick kids into learning stuff should be illegal. I haven't learned a single thing in my life and I'm not gonna start now. Neither will my children. 
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Jul 16, 2020 21:23
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The daughter of one of the lead developers of Oregon Trail didn't know it was so universally known until she was at the college I attended, and commented that it was a bit strange realizing everyone had played a game her dad made. Anyone play number munchers? That was a neat little program.
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Jul 16, 2020 22:09
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Hyrax Attack! posted:The daughter of one of the lead developers of Oregon Trail didn't know it was so universally known until she was at the college I attended, and commented that it was a bit strange realizing everyone had played a game her dad made. I got pretty good at primes as a kid on the IIe's in school. I didn't know what primes were so I just memorized which numbers worked.
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Jul 16, 2020 22:23
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The Carmen Sandiego games were a delight. I had one that came with a world atlas and I really did learn a lot although I never came close to winning. The upper levels had zero margin for error. In the USA version you had a week to solve a case and I believe there were three methods of travel auto used depending on how far you were going: plane, train, or car. Plane and car were fine but the drat train ate up so much time it could make you lose close cases. I did appreciate that the Warrant-Bot would accept whatever suspect description he was provided, ideally from real evidence, sometimes from a coin flip if I were short on time and it could be one of two people. Although the games were well designed so if you caught someone early in your career they’d be out of the suspect pool for future cases. I liked that if you failed a case and didn’t recover the loot you could still continue in your career, and America is accepting that the Golden Gate Bridge or Grand Canyon are gone and not coming back. Hyrax Attack! fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Jul 19, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 06:27
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I was always a fan of those Crosscountry USA games that ostensibly were supposed to teach you geography but really just examined how much being a long haul trucker would suck.
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Aug 9, 2020 19:18
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food court bailiff posted:I was always a fan of those Crosscountry USA games that ostensibly were supposed to teach you geography but really just examined how much being a long haul trucker would suck. It is fun to OK, it is terrifying to turn around a truck. That said. I want to fly a plane.
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Aug 17, 2020 09:25
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The only things anyone ever learned from Oregon Trail is that buffalo have a fuckload of meat on them and dysentery sucks.
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Aug 17, 2020 18:35
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The OG Where in the World is Carmen Santiago is a game I will always go back to. And occasionally the Deluxe edition one that was released in the early 90s
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Aug 18, 2020 07:13
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My biggest edutainment memories are of the Reader Rabbit and Cluefinders series, though I also remember some other games like Science Blaster Jr. and this one game that I'm not entirely sure if it was actually edutainment or not involving a girl who daydreamed she was a galactic hero of sorts
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Aug 24, 2020 06:30
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I remember having some fun with Project Space Station on the Apple IIe way back in the late 80s. I never quite got the hang of managing projects properly and many of my astronauts died on their way back to their home planet.
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Oct 16, 2020 06:13
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Not quite a game entirely, but I played a lot of the Mind Maze game that cMe included in Encarta 98.
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Oct 16, 2020 14:47
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RBA Starblade posted:The only things anyone ever learned from Oregon Trail is that buffalo have a fuckload of meat on them and dysentery sucks. Even though you could only carry 200 pounds back to the wagon, it wasn't worth it to hunt anything else unless you absolutely had to. Did any poor sap even bother trying to get rabbit meat?
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Oct 19, 2020 06:08
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The Kins posted:The Super Solvers games were great, especially Gizmos & Gadgets. treasure mountain was extremely my jam
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Oct 24, 2020 15:42
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My grandma bought me the jump start series. And I played them a lot for some reason. I still hear the first grade theme in my head...
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Oct 25, 2020 04:03
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This game right here was my poo poo as a child, and I still remember it fondly to this very day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7fdbydwdeE It had a Brazilian Portuguese dub which was really good. I made almost every kid I met play it and they all loved it. Game had some great tunes too. BRING BACK EDUTAINMENT GAMES
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Mar 19, 2021 22:24
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I stumbled upon Opening Night by MECC recently and my friend made this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbyC_7SfGyo
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Mar 28, 2021 08:26
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I learned homerow typing from Mario Teaches Typing. I remember the Magic School Bus games being really good. I had the Ocean one that had a bunch of fun mini-games to play.
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Jul 5, 2021 15:33
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Anyone remember ADI's Comprehensive Learning System from Sierra? My friend had it, there was a goofy alien character named ADI whose mission was to convince Earthlings to do math homework or something like that. There was a bunch of multimedia stuff you could mess around with, and if you did enough homework you could unlock a few Sierra games (not necessarily the good/memorable ones though). I played a ton of it at my friend's house, but it doesn't seem like many people played it. It's actually kind of tough to find info about now.
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Jul 6, 2021 05:03
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Have there been any recent good edutainment titles at all? A lot of them are late 80's to early 90's and it feels like it's been a neglected genre. I'd pre-order a high budget, Unreal Engine version of Super Solvers Treasure Mountain.
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Nov 25, 2021 13:23
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DEEP STATE PLOT posted:treasure mountain was extremely my jam Hell yeah son, never beat it though.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:55
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The Kins posted:The Super Solvers games were great, especially Gizmos & Gadgets. I had Treasure MathStorm as a kid and I could swear that the version I played as a kid was in 16-color EGA and every couple years I try searching for evidence of that version but I've only ever been able to find copies/footage of the SVGA version (or the 16-color version of Treasure Mountain) and it drives me insane. There's a very good chance that I'm just misremembering something from when I was very young, but I'm just not convinced 
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Nov 26, 2021 06:38
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Entorwellian posted:Have there been any recent good edutainment titles at all? A lot of them are late 80's to early 90's and it feels like it's been a neglected genre. I guess it depends on what you consider Edutainment. Carmen's was always good, and there was a game I'd play in like...Junior High..Doctor Quandary's? I think? That was always an okay game, at least as I remember it. Edit: It was Dr Quandary's and its abandonware! Man, SA rabbit holes...
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Nov 26, 2021 06:48
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I had some submarine based eduatainment game as where you explored a psuedo-metroidvania underwater landscape with doors controller by math and logic puzzles. Shamefully I was dogshit at the actual combat, not the math, so I could never get very far.
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Nov 26, 2021 09:25
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