30: MECC Expeditions
Brother Scooter has recently come through with a fresh box of labeled and unlabelled 5 1/4" floppy disks from the local Value Village, and needless to say, I'm chuffed! For the next while, I'm going to be digging through the pile and giving them an extensive quality-test for the benefit of you, my dear reader.
Today's candidate is MECC Expeditions: a three-pack of text-adventure educational games published in 1984 by Minnesota Education Computing Corporation. MECC was founded all the way back in 1973, had already amassed over 300 titles before this compilation was released, and boasted that one-third of all software used in schools by the early 1980s was produced by their developers. Among these were both legitimately-interesting efforts like "The Glass Computer" (educating children on how a computer responded to BASIC commands internally), and more pedestrian efforts such as Spelling Bee (in which you learn to spell words good).
To begin, let me air a few technical gripes regarding this release. This is unfortunately a game exhibiting a frustrating trend of hard-coding drive 8 to be used for loading from disk, meaning you can't use it with any other disk drives if you're the type to use multiple drives and swap drive numbers around (often a necessity for Commodore computers featuring internal disk drives). Even if I load the program itself from drive 9, it's still looking for content in drive 8 once it's up and running. That's a pain in the butt. Additionally, load times are tortuously slow, even by the expected 1541 standards (i.e "go make yourself a coffee" tier), though this may actually be beneficial in giving you the downtime needed to narrate your experiences for blogging purposes if you have an additional laptop handy. The main title screen takes forever, each game takes forever. I cannot understate how essential it is to own a Fastload cartridge as a C64 owner in the present day - us modern folk no longer have the patience.
I couldn't help but start with the old standard, Oregon Trail (or "Oregon", as more accurately described in this release). In case you haven't been briefed on the nature of this adventure: you're trying to make it from Missouri to Oregon with your family, impending doom is always at hand, and you're unlikely to make it out alive. One of my oxen broke its leg in the first turn, and my daughter broke her arm in the second. On my next turn, I died of pneumonia and the game was over. Life was hard in the frontier days, and life is still hard in the world of 8-bit cross-country travel. MECC admirably tries to slip in a few "action" sections (shooting at wild animals crossing the screen), but very little should be expected of these interludes. On my second play-through.. I died of pneumonia within four turns, instead of three. Pro tip: save some money for medical attention in case the need presents itself.
My next stop was "Voyageurs", a game based around a canoe expedition from Lake Superior to Fort. St. Pierre (haven't been, sounds nice though). You carry goods and try to get as many of them safely to the trading post as possible, with a bounty of elegant furs as your potential reward.
Despite a few added presentation flourishes and some slight shifts in the types of supplies you purchase and allot yourself, this game bored me greatly compared to the briskly-paced Oregon Trail. Lots seemed to happen (at least weather-wise), but none of it really seemed to affect me, and the game just saw me through an endless loop of uneventful days, perhaps intended to be a symbolic gesture toward the concept of life as a Minnesotan fur trader. Along the way, my canoe sank a couple of times, though I was left relatively unscathed. I did complete my business trip and hit a top-5 high score, but the game didn't let me leave my name or initials to mark my accomplishment, which seems like a woeful missed opportunity in a game of this sort. No peperony and chease for Hank today, no sir.
The conclusion of my pelt-slinging expedition leaves only "Furs", a tale of, you guess it, more fur-trading amongst the Ottawa Indians (hey, their wording, not mine) in the late 16th century. Unfortunately, Furs failed to load properly, whether that's a result of the 40-year old diskette misbehaving, or my 40-year old 1571 drive misbehaving (remember what I mentioned about not being able which drive to choose to load from?). Hope you enjoyed the review, come back next time!
..OK, not really. Instead, I cheated and watched a playthrough video. The game offers three different difficulty levels based on the route you wish to travel. The graphical approach is almost identical to Voyageurs, and several of the events repeat itself - more canoe chaos awaits you. However, it's a little prettier presentation-wise than Voyageurs (or Oregon) overall, and is definitely the better of the two non-midwest-trail-related games included in the set.
As a whole, Expeditions is put together competently, but unfortunately treads water as a set based on the repetitive experiences found in all three games. Let it be said that Oregon Trail is an addictive, essential offering for any home computer worth its weight in salt, but it might not be necessary to go further once you've made it to the end of that particular trail. I feel like Oregon Trail's place in history is untouched due largely to its ubiquity, and the gaming world had Oregon Trail in its possession, adding any other games to the Oregon Trail genre seems like an exercise in redundancy. I make this statement more out of Oregon Trail as a definitive experience than a historical precedent to the other two games, because I couldn't actually determine which of them came first (or second, or third), and the "original vs. remake" status of at least two of the games was questionable. I did find that "Furs" appears to be based on a 1978 game called "Fur Trader", and that "Oregon Trail" (the original Apple II one, not this one) may also be based on an even older 1971 game called "Oregon" (same title as this MECC one), and the "Oregon" in this release is actually based on that older version instead.. I think? You lost me, MECC. Shows what I know.
MECC targets Expeditions at players 8-13 (or targeted, I guess, as they closed in 1999), and I can safely conclude that a compilation like this one was best played in the corner of an '80s elementary school classroom over lunch break on a rainy day, instead of the harsher glare of a modern context. Don't expect the world of it, and it's a nice throwback into text-based gaming history. I'd highly doubt I ever touch this set again after I finish this review, but the menu system is decently laid out, the games work as they should.. if you'll pardon the cliche, it is what it is, fur better or worse.
This site is copyright 2023 Hank Wesley Chorkin. If you don't like it, you can get out!
Back