Once again, in keeping with OT’s overall feel, the hunting bit, though ultimately simple, is marked by clever design and several elements that lend a surprising level of depth to the gameplay. You try to shoot the wildlife by using the mouse to control your rifle’s crosshair.
The hunting sequence is a rudimentary arcade-style interlude with wild animals traversing the screen horizontally at differing speeds, distances, and degrees of directional shift. At any time during your journey – aside from stops at forts and natural landmarks these places have too many people around, the game says, to make hunting feasible – you can stop and attempt to hunt wild animals. This can be of crucial importance if it turns out your initial provisioning choices were less than optimal.Īnother important aspect is hunting. Along the trek are many forts where you have the option of stopping and trading with other pioneers. Sometimes the effects of your choices will be discovered early on, but others will not become apparent until you are deep in the thick of it, or even near the game’s end. All these choices have the potential to noticeably impact the success or failure of your venture. You make choices at the start about your pioneer’s profession (banker, doctor, farmer, carpenter, etc.) what provisions, and in what amounts, you will buy and what month to begin the journey.
The graphic images for locations and pioneers you may encounter add in this regard as well.īeyond teaching history, The Oregon Trail is essentially a game of strategic and tactical decisions. Just paying some attention to your progress on the map can be instructive. Moreover, if during the game you regularly stop to talk with other pioneers, The Oregon Trail will gradually reveal a significant amount of period detail and anecdote, which helps to create the aura of an authentic historical milieu. Granted, the depictions are highly abstract, as is appropriate considering the number of children who played the game, yet it seems probable most who play OT will find themselves trying to imagine what it must have been like to make that often brutal and uncertain journey. It doesn’t shy away from depicting a spectrum of hazards and mishaps, ranging from irksome to lethal, which befell pioneers on the Oregon Trail. Civilization), and may be characterized overall as a mostly simple experience, it succeeds remarkably well in its original goal. While The Oregon Trail does not approach the gameplay depth of some other more comprehensive simulation games that followed later (e.g. Play Oregon Trail Deluxe online! Oregon Trail Deluxe game description
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Sales quickly indicated its appeal reached much further than grade-level students, with hordes of adults snapping up this primordial historical adventure simulator in addition to sales to schools “en masse”. It was ostensibly designed as a teaching tool, with the aim being to give school kids some idea what it was like for pioneer families setting out from eastern American states in the 19th century who hoped to eventually settle in distant Oregon. The Oregon Trail is a prime example of a classic computer game present at the dawn of the home computer era still fun to play today.
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