I'm BAAAAAACK!

(Please note that the information from this post is outdated. A more recent and accurate post can be fond here.)

HOO! Good morning/evening/afternoon/whenever the hell you read this. It is I, Johnny, here once again after completely skipping out on 2014. And another thing: happy freakin' new year!

So yeah, I guess I'd better start with some info (like where I've been) before I get into the meat and potatoes of the post (today I will be covering the Learning Voyage series, in addition to some other stuff).

All right, so Fall 2013. Better start there, as that was when I made my last post. Without going into too much detail, I'll say that I didn't do so well in school during the fall 2013 semester. To say the least, I... didn't take it well. I spent a few months during what would have been my spring 2014 semester trying (and failing) to find a job, then took one class at a community college during the summer and went back to being a full-time student during fall 2014. School went much better during summer and fall 2014 than summer and fall 2013, so I'm incredibly happy.

As for why I haven't updated since 2013, it was partly that, and partly because I forgot (as I sometimes do) that I even have this blog. Plus, many of the things I want to talk about are so obscure, I can't even find pictures or videos of them!

Which brings me to Learning Voyage. Unfortunately, I only have a few screenshots that are in grayscale, as I don't have a copy of the game itself and it falls into the "extremely obscure" category (which is right below "so obscure that there are exactly zero photos/videos/whatevers of it"). On the plus side, screenshots are screenshots.

Okay, so here's a little bit of background before I talk about the games themselves. A long time ago, I saw a video on YouTube of a very cheesy and downright awful FMV (full-motion video) intro to an old 90's edutainment computer game. When I saw the video, I thought, "Oh my God, I actually remember this game!" It was yet another game that I only played at school, and not at home. The reason? It was part of Knowledge Adventure's ClassWorks Gold, a suite of edutainment games for use exclusively and specifically in schools. The suite is now completely and totally Internet-based and is owned by a different company, Curriculum Advantage, but from what I can tell (which isn't a lot), many of the games are the same.

Despite being published by Knowledge Adventure, ClassWorks Gold contained games from other publishers, including Davidson and Associates, Educational Publishing Concepts (whose "games" were just quizzes created specifically for ClassWorks), Tom Snyder Productions (the company behind the original Science Court games), and the publishers of this game: Learning Way... Which I've also seen stylized as "Learningway" and "LearningWay".

Now, sadly, the video I mentioned is long gone, so I had no way of finding out what it was called when I decided I wanted to track it down. Long story short, I eventually, through Googling, not only found out the name of one of the games I distinctly remembered playing in that series, but also came across screenshots of other games in that series, as well as other games in unrelated series that I remembered playing.

But I'm not here to discuss those. The focus of this post will be on a particular Learning Voyage game: Learning Voyage Grade 3 Reading.

The activity I most remember playing was a clown dunking activity. The intro to the activity is as follows:

Alien-bug kid: Here's a game that's sure to make a huge splash! (rimshot) Ahem. (he proceeds to explain how to play the game proper) Once you finish, you get to dunk the clown! Choose how you wanna do it, then click the "Dunk!" button. And remember: don't try this at home; this clown is a drained professional! (rimshot) All right, I'll leave the humor to the clown.

Of course, that's just how I remember it, and even though I have a good memory, I could always be wrong (the SmartyPants Tales of Beatrix Potter theme song, anyone?).

So yeah, you start by answering questions about a sentence, or putting parts of a story in order, or something along those lines.

If you weren't scared of clowns before...

Then, once you answer enough questions correctly, you get to dunk him. You have several oh-so-humorous ways to dunk him. Select a combination of ones you want, click "Dunk!", and watch him fall into the watery abyss below.

And by "watery abyss", of course, I mean "DUNKING POOL".

There are other activities as well, but this one was the most memorable.

Now, as for that intro...

Dad: What? I told you to put the ant traps by the doors!
(cut to a bunch of ants inside the family's home)
Boy: Whoops. I thought you said to put the trapdoors by the ants!

...Yeah. These games are like that. But there's one thing I know: I MUST HAVE THIS GAME! And I will not give up until I find it! And hopefully others in the series as well.

Oh yeah, um, random screenshot from ClassWorks itself because... it exists.

This screenshot took me way back when I saw it...

And that will be it for now. Next time, I hope to have other games for y'all. Also, I'm postponing the toy I had been talking about for a while for a couple of reasons:

1. I don't have any pictures of it.
2. I doubt anyone remembers my talking about it by now.

So next time will be... I don't know. I'll figure it out. I don't wanna make any promises, because I'm worried that I won't have any high-quality pictures of it. But anyway, see ya then!

-Johnny