Saturday, July 16

Edu-gaming

A while ago, I started sniffing around the internet for a bunch of early-90s games that I enjoyed growing up. There's this lovely thing called Abandonware. If there's an old game that never gets re-released on another platform, or bundled with other software, or otherwise recycled, it just fades into the ether. It's been abandoned, and as such, becomes free on the internets.

So I collected a few classic DOS titles and played them for a bit. Alex latched onto them, and I taught him to play them.

Fortunately, I was always attracted to Sim titles, and things that were stealth-educational.

There's Sim Tower:


And Sim Ant (which I didn't actually play, but my siblings enjoyed, so I'm learning it alongside Alex)


Sim City 2000, which I utterly adored and played for hours and hours:


The Oregon Trail original version. I have died of dysentery/snakebite/broken legs/etc. etc. etc. But I reached Oregon. Alex hasn't yet managed to do this because the text menus stymie him.


And finally there's Rollercoaster Tycoon, which I actually had on disk and didn't need to download. Much, much love has gone into this game.

3 comments:

Farm Girl said...

Yeah, you don't realize how real the game is until Alex began telling me about the lawnmower running over his legs. He really likes those games. i always thought stealth learning was the best.

Anne said...

You are BRILLIANT, dear! I had NO idea about this. Thank you so much for the information! We loved the Oregon Trail, too! You are BRILLIANT! :)

Jennifer said...

Yahoo! How do I do this? I can't wait to play sim city 2000 (with the children, of course...of course).

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