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troidy

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Traveling the Trails - Intro & Part One

Just like everyone else of a certain age or older, I played Oregon Trail when I was younger, and watching the Oregon Trail 3DS quick look made me both nostalgic and sort of sad. In my memory, I remember Oregon Trail as a game that required strategy and critical thinking, neither of which the 3DS version had. So, what I’m going to do is attempt to discover where the Oregon Trail series went off the rails (or off the trails, if you want to be snarky about it), and transformed a great edutainment product to a piece of software that only functions to prey on nostalgia. I’m going to do this by playing all of the Oregon Trail titles in consequential order, starting with the earliest version I could find, mostly composed of text, through at least Oregon Trail 5, and perhaps into the Wii/iPhone games if I really want to punish myself.

While I might be excited to jump in, I am not going to try and do this sort of thing without first setting some basic ground rules. For starters, I will not be playing every single remake and repackaging that has been done over the years. Many of the titles were only slight remakes of previous versions, so I’ll be sticking to the core, numbered, titles. While we’re touching on limitations, I will only play each game once. I will try my best to get to the end of the trail, but if I don’t succeed, I am most likely not going to start over. To try and keep my impressions fresh, I am going to refrain from playing any of the games beforehand that I have not played at some point in the past, other than to make sure they work with whatever convoluted emulation process I am using to get it to run and still be able to record video. For full disclosure as far as this is concerned, the only Oregon Trail games I have played are the DOS version of “Oregon Trail Deluxe” and “Oregon Trail II”.

To start us off, I’m going to play a version of Oregon Trail that most people don’t even know exists, and I’m rather lucky I stumbled across it when I was doing initial research to see if this sort of thing would even be feasible. When Oregon Trail was first created, it was a mainframe game, which meant no graphics, and a child would have needed to pay for time on a terminal, or have been fortunate enough to attend a school that paid for main frame access to play it. In this rudimentary version of the game, everything was communicated to you through text, including hunting, which measured how many times you could type “BANG”, “WHAM”, or “POW” into the terminal. Sadly, while I was able to find the source code for this game, I was not able to find a decent way to run it. The version of the game I’ll be playing today instead was the first graphical version of what we now know as The Oregon Trail, seen here simply as “OREGON”. This version of the game was initially featured in a few different educational game compilations, including the one I used, “MECC - Elementary Volume 6”.

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