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1971
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The Oregon Trail
Atari 8-bit version from 1982
★★★★★★★★★★
The Oregon Trail is an educational strategy game. As the leader of an American pioneer family, travel along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon via covered wagon in 1847. Not all available money has to be spent at the beginning, but buying supplies in forts along the way is more expensive.
At the start of each round, a choice has to be made whether to hunt or not. Alternatively, a fort can be entered every other round or so. After deciding how much food to consume, a few random events follow, most of which are negative. With the exception of encountering riders, they don't offer any choices on how to proceed. Shooting is required to hunt and deal with hostiles, its outcome depending on how fast a word representing a gunshot is entered.
The Oregon Trail is a simple game and offers little in the way of choices, but it has enough different events to not be too repetitive. The gameplay is well balanced and fairly easy as long as the shooting is on point. Overall, I found it mildly entertaining.
Title Screen  Instructions  Instructions  |
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Notes
| ⁃ The first arcade games were released.
⁃ The only playable version of Computer Space I could find is a browser variant. Playing it for a few minutes was enough for me. ⁃ I wasn't able to get Galaxy Game to run on MAME without severe flickering, but at least I figured out how to change the DIP switches before I gave up. Ironically, the single-player practice mode didn't even work. Le sigh. |
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