The Oregon Trail | Cheerful Ghost

The Oregon Trail Handheld Is A Great Way To Relive The Classic Game

A few weeks ago The Oregon Trail Handheld was marked down to under $10 and I picked it up. If you don't remember, last year Target had the Oregon Trail handheld exclusively in stores alongside an Oregon Trail card game. I picked up the card game and wasn't impressed but when I recently got the handheld I took it to a beach trip with some friends and asked them if they wanted to play it. We had a very lucky run and made it all the way to Oregon only having one person in our party die on the rapids on the Willamette River. The Oregon Trail Handheld is a great port of the game that looks like it might not work with the odd controls on front but I was very surprised how... Read All A few weeks ago The Oregon Trail Handheld was marked down to under $10 and I picked it up. If you don't remember, last year Target had the Oregon Trail handheld exclusively in stores alongside an Oregon Trail card game. I picked up the card game and wasn't impressed but when I recently got the handheld I took it to a beach trip with some friends and asked them if they wanted to play it. We had a very lucky run and made it all the way to Oregon only having one person in our party die on the rapids on the Willamette River. The Oregon Trail Handheld is a great port of the game that looks like it might not work with the odd controls on front but I was very surprised how seamless everything worked. The games screen is light enough to see quite well and the speaker is good enough to do the original bleeps and bloop effects justice.

At the end of the day these kinds of handhelds are a great way to come back and play a game you miss but if you didn't grow up in the glow of Oregon Trail on the Apple II this might not be interesting to you. The game itself is quite good and i'd my only critique is that some runs are so punishing as to be quite dark in tone. In one run everything might be going in your favor and the game seems easy and the next run you can have everyone in your party wiped out before you hit the halfway point.

As I said before I took this game to a beach house and played it with friends and if you are so included, I recommend playing it that way. Not that you must play this game from a beach house but playing this with friends feels like a shared experience game akin to Dungeons and Dragons. Basically you have one person take the roll of the Wagon Leader who controls the game and reads out what's happening on screen and everyone takes part in what choices you make to head west.

It seems that the incredibly cheap price I picked up the game for was a discount to clear out stock but if you can find it, i'd recommend getting it. As LGR says in his video above, this handheld will become collectable at some point and if it's well worth a couple bucks to play every so often to die of dysentery, a broken leg or actually make it to Oregon alive.

Did The Oregon Trail Lie To Us All?

In the latest episode of Game/Show Jamin talks about the Apple classic game The Oregon Trail. He starts things off with a seemingly ridiculous premise that everyones favorite squirrel shooting simulator lied to us. I recommend you watch the video to experience a really interesting and light history of the The Oregon Trail but also educational games as a genre. Apparently educational games are not very good at educating people and if they are it's generally not for what they set out to do. In the end Oregon Trail does a good job teaching us about simulation and economic basics but doesn't do a great job teaching us what it's like to have actually been on the trail.... Read All

scrypt Supporter wrote on 04/05/2016 at 06:54pm

I could see that there may be an issue regarding the scholastic merit of some "educational games," but using The Oregon Trail as a test seems misconstrued when it sounds like the original creators were simply looking for a catalyst to stir young minds to inquiry, rather than to build an actual lesson plan in game form. The original Oregon Trail started as a board game, later made into a computer game (in two weeks, mind you), for teletype game play (hardly like the game we know, despite Jamin's claim, unless you think tabletop D&D and Icewind Dale for PC are practically the same experience), and existed as such for about the first decade of it's life. It wasn't made into the game we recognize until the early 80's, with very little input from it's original creators.

I'm curious to know who heralds The Oregon Trail as "one of the most important educational games, ever to exist." The closest I could find was from this old PC Gamer article, which seems more poignant in it's understanding of the scope of the game: http://www.pcgamer.com/most-important-pc-games/2/

Once again, I feel Jamin abuses hyperbole to make a point, this time to the extent of inappropriately disparaging a game for not being more than it was ever intended to be, or could have feasibly been, at it's inception. I'm confused by some of his analogies (e.g. [4:42] Rawitsch's adjusting of event probabilities, which somehow results in alternative historical experiences in the game, or [5:44] the misrepresented association between intuitive interfaces and Lusory Attitude, and the weird implication that this made the game fun, in contrast with it's earliest concept as a teletype game.), and obviously a little disappointed in the way he went about presenting what could have been a more interesting topic, without all of the typical Game/Show platitudes.

What might be more interesting to emphasize, is that the original board game, and teletype game, played in Rawitsch's classroom was an exercise in group play, which, according to an article from New York University (http://bit.ly/1Xf7vPx), is one of the most effective ways of implementing games into education, promoting mastery goal orientation, rather than individual performance goal orientation which seems to inhibit potential learning opportunities.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 04/06/2016 at 03:46am

> but using The Oregon Trail as a test seems misconstrued when it sounds like the original creators were simply looking for a catalyst to stir young minds to inquiry, rather than to build an actual lesson plan in game form.

I think the whole notion of Oregon Trail lying to us is also kind of silly. That said, those kinds of headlines get clicks and it seems a bit dodgy because to make it payoff in the video you have to do things that maybe don't make sense?

> I'm curious to know who heralds The Oregon Trail as "one of the most important educational games, ever to exist.

I would. I think the original Oregon Trail is heralded as a great game because it was impactful to so many. It may not have been the pinnacle of educational gaming but it was so deep and rich for me and I loved playing it on the Apple II and Commodore. Lots of kids grew up in the 90's having played it as it was a staple in tons of schools. You might not find a ton of thought pieces about it, but seeing games like Organ Trail and the like existing now kind of nod to it's influence.

> Once again, I feel Jamin abuses hyperbole to make a point, this time to the extent of inappropriately disparaging a game for not being more than it was ever intended to be, or could have feasibly been, at it's inception.

The video title is clickbait for sure, but I don't think the historical significance of the Oregon Trail was overblown. At least to me.

> What might be more interesting to emphasize, is that the original board game, and teletype game, played in Rawitsch's classroom was an exercise in group play, which, according to an article from New York University (http://bit.ly/1Xf7vPx), is one of the most effective ways of implementing games into education, promoting mastery goal orientation, rather than individual performance goal orientation which seems to inhibit potential learning opportunities.

Absolutely, but for whatever reason the method they chose might work for the large gaming audience? I'm not sure, I love a good deep dive into that sort of thing you mention so it wouldn't bother me

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Like @Adym, I too remember this game. I pretty much always

http://www.caffeinenebula.com/quizzes/quizFiles/oregontrail/dysentery.gif

Like @Adym, I too remember this game.

I pretty much always played as the Banker from Boston so I could buy a ton of bullets and shoot squirrels. One time a classmate and I shot a squirrel hunderds of times to see if the amount of squirrel meat in pounds would increase.

Sadly it did not. It was still only 2 pounds.

Who didnt play this game at school? Remember to buy as many

Who didn't play this game at school? Remember to buy as many bullets as you can!

The game still holds up. There's a Facebook version that's decent, but the original is pretty awesome.

jdodson Admin wrote on 02/03/2012 at 01:43am

You have Cholera!

Timogorgon Member wrote on 02/03/2012 at 04:14am

You have died of Dysentery.

jdodson Admin wrote on 02/03/2012 at 04:14am

I literally just posted something about that. lol

Timogorgon Member wrote on 02/03/2012 at 04:15am

lol I noticed that, I posted my comment, refreshed the page, and there was your message.

jdodson Admin wrote on 02/03/2012 at 04:16am

Amazing.

RobertoMontobon wrote on 03/11/2018 at 05:04am

A Facebook friend of mine just shared a post with a picture of a car On the freeway and basically said that this guy is the creator of the Oregon Trail video game and he’s a total jerk when he drives and actually quite dangerous and has been reported to the police. As I read that post I thought of another recent post where someone shared a picture of a girl texting as she was driving. It made me think of the movie the circle with Tom Hanks, A movie which had some very real red flags about the way were using Social media. (I think Apple somehow got a hold of the movie and made the ending stupid So we wouldn’t think of that company as evil). Anyways, it just feels a little scary to me that someone could not like the way I drive and then share it with hundreds and hundreds of people.

jdodson Admin wrote on 03/11/2018 at 11:14pm

Hahahaha. Yeah.

I guess that's the fear for people that have a certain kind of fame that any kind of perceived slight could mean someone says something bad about you. I remember a few times online people on forums say this or that celeb is a total jerk when what they describe it just seemed like the person didn't want to be bothered in the moment. Which I can totally understand, sometimes people just want to go to the store and buy a candy bar and just have it be that.

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