Some Updates and a Request for Help

First off, what's up with me? Not much. Some family stuff came up, so that's why I haven't made a post in forever.

Surprise of surprises, this post is not going to be about that tape. That seems to be a theme with this blog: I keep saying my next post is going to be about something, and then for one reason or another, I realize that I have to write about something else instead. In this case, I have some updates I wanted to share with you guys.

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Let's start with a few updates on one of my earliest posts: the one about the Playskool Talk-Back Voice Recorder (no relation to the Yak Bak). First of all, that's how it was spelled, not Talkback as I had put it on my blog post.

Second, I've finally found one! ...On an auction sight. And it's been sold. But I can't see for how much because that requires an account. A paid-for account. I can't even share the pictures here because of copyright.

Third, the sound effects. I remembered three of them: one was a spring, one was a monkey, and one was a telephone. Looking at the picture, I can see another one: a bicycle horn. ...Well, the label is actually of a French horn or a trumpet or something, but I distinctly remember that the sound was a bike horn.

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Next, I want to talk a bit about Learning Voyage and Classworks. These two have been my obsession recently. I have been trying so hard to find out more about them, but nothing doing. In the case of Learning Voyage, I don't even know who's behind them, Learningways or Davidson. I also don't know if they were exclusively for schools or not. If it was Learningways and not Davidson, then they probably were only for schools, which means I won't find a copy very easily. But that still wouldn't explain why I saw the intro cutscene on YouTube years ago.

Classworks at least has their old website archived, so I can still take a look at drawings of how the box looks, and I can also confirm that it originally came in two "pieces": one for the server and one for the workstations (those are the actual computers in the schools, which connect to the server that stores all the data).

I may see if I can talk to the principal at my old elementary school, and see if by some miracle they still have their old Classworks discs. Other than that, I'm running out of places to try and find old educational software for schools. Thrift stores are certainly an option, as are flea markets, but I wouldn't count on being able to find any of that stuff there. I can hope, and I can dream, but it's incredibly unlikely that I'll be able to find any of these nostalgic games again.

At least, by myself.

This is where you guys come in: please help me! Anyone who comes across or happens to have a copy of any of this software (Learning Voyage: Sand Trapped!, Learning Voyage: Swamped!, or Classworks Gold Edition), I would very much appreciate it if you would make ISO images of them, put them on a file-sharing site like Mega or Mediafire, and send them my way. No torrents, please, as I will not take any chances with that.

Man, I feel so silly asking for this, but I swear I'm not doing this for selfish purposes. ...Okay, I kind of am and kind of not. One part is for more accurate documentation (because I have been able to find very little if any), the other part is for nostalgia.

The reason I'm writing about all this is because I have to stop obsessing before the obsession becomes unhealthy, and I feel writing this stuff down helps me calm down. And it also fits on the blog, because these products really are obscure; one of my personal friends and one random YouTube user have heard of the Learning Voyage games, and none of my online friends have. My second cousin, who went to the same elementary school as me, said he vaguely remembers them from Classworks. Heck, in general he vaguely remembers Classworks.

Well, on that note, I'll ask y'all this question: Does anyone remember Classworks or Learning Voyage? Does anyone remember seeing that intro cutscene on YouTube back in 2006 or 2007 or so? As a refresher...

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

Which could be an inaccurate transcript, because I haven't seen that clip in years. Anyway, now I'm done ranting. Any help would be most appreciated, and thanks for reading! Next post will hopefully be that audio tape I was teasing. See ya then!

-Johnny

Spell It Plus!

At long last, a post about Spell It Plus! for Macintosh.

This was a game made by Davidson and Associates, originally released for MS-DOS and later for Mac OS. The Mac version was the one I grew up with. I played it at my elementary school on the days we weren't using Classworks or Type To Learn. I had a lot of fun with it, but... much like KidPhonics, I don't really think it's stood the test of time.

Also, this game should not be confused with the much later Spell It Deluxe for Windows and Macintosh. That one changed the games and used an updated speech synthesis engine.

So, now for the game itself. I made a video you can watch below, but this time I also have screenshots for those who don't want to watch the whole thing.



The game starts off with a goofy little animation of a frog riding a skateboard.

EXTREME SPORTS!!

Afterwards, it asks you to type in your name. You can, of course, choose whatever you want. I just chose my name.

My other choice would have been "Butts"

 You're then greeted with the main screen, where you hear what I consider to be the most wonderful sound in this game: "Welcome to Spell It Plus!" I don't know why, but I just love hearing that.

Thanks, I do feel welcomed.

 This sort of reminds me of the game picker from the original Math Blaster, with the main game being the name of the game itself. Also the redundancy (Math Blaster Math and Spell It Plus! Spelling).

From here you have a few choices for games to play: Decode It, Unscramble It, Correct It, Study It, and of course Spell It itself. We'll start with Decode It, because why not? The way this one works is you have a series of words with missing letters. Fill in the missing letters and a corresponding letter will appear in the box below. Once you've finished all of the words, you'll have a complete sentence.

Can I buy a vowel?

Your secondary reward is to see an animation of the frog dude shooting some hoops. By which I mean, he dribbles and shoots.

Next we have Correct It. It's self-explanatory and boring: you just correct words that are spelled incorrectly. Your only reward is to see a small animation of that frog guy doing more extreme sports

Of course, most language arts teachers probably love this one.

Next up is yet another boring one: Study It. You... study words. Okay, you actually get to play some games, but it's simple: you see the word at the top, you hear it, you type it. Once you start typing the word, it goes away, but it's still easy. There are options to make it harder, but it's still very plain.

Yawn...

My favorite of the bunch is Unscramble It. It's a bit like Tic Tac Toe... except there's a one player version as well. But at least with the one player version you get points no matter what.

Now of course, there has to be spelling in there as well; otherwise it defeats the purpose of this game. Choose a square, and a jumbled-up word appears. You have to unscramble the word (hence the name) in order to get the points. Afterwards, the box turns gray and has that frog's face on it. You get bonus points for getting three boxes in a row (diagonally, across, or up and down).

Um, yeah, this isn't creepy at all...

Oh, also, once you get three in a row, you hear this amazingly hilarious sound. Unfortunately, I can't put the sound clip here because of limitations with Blogger, but you can hear it in the video.

Finally, I'll talk about the Spell It game itself. Basically, Frog Dude runs and jumps over hurdles. If he eats the right words (you choose whether you want to target the words that are spelled correctly or those that aren't), he gets a speed boost and can win against Blue Frog Dude. Eat the wrong word or miss your target, and you don't get a speed boost.

A certain song about "eating it" comes to mind now...

Once you reach the finish line, you get a medal. You'll either get bronze, silver, or gold, depending on how many words you got right.

Yaaaaaay.

Now, here's the main problem I have with this game: you have to time everything perfectly. This means even if you're a hair off in your timing, a box will appear around the word and you won't get the speed boost. This is especially frustrating when you have longer words and you have to read them carefully to make sure they're spelled correctly. That takes so long that by the time you realize that it is spelled correctly, when you go to eat it, it won't count. And this tends to happen a lot for me.

As such, I've never been able to get a gold medal. The highest I've gotten is a silver medal. Obviously it's not because I can't spell, but simply because I don't have enough freaking time to see if the longer words are spelled right or not.

When you quit (which is a fantastic option by now), the same guy who welcomed you will say "Goodbye, see you soon!" Yeah right.

To be fair, this isn't the worst edutainment game I've played, but overall, it's just really, really boring. I can totally see why this wasn't one of Davidson's more successful series. Two of the five activities are at least somewhat enjoyable (Decode It and Unscramble It), but the rest are either boring or frustrating. This game gets a failing grade. Davidson, see me after class.

And bring a copy of Learning Voyage: Sand Trapped! with you. I imagine even that would be better than this, but I'd have to play it again to be sure.

Next time, I'm going to move on from computer games and talk about another old tape from my childhood: a sing-along tape by the Purple Balloon Players. I'm going to chance it and upload the songs to YouTube. Until then... (puts on the voice of the announcer guy) Goodbye, see you soon!

-Johnny

The Wario Land 4 Website!

Remember my rant on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine? Remember when I mentioned the Wario Land 4 website, which you can visit through that but it doesn't actually do anything?

Thanks to the power of Google, I recently discovered that someone recreated it. It's available at www.welcometogreedville.com. I figured I would give a more in-depth review of the classic site, which despite having people remember it, is still fairly obscure.

I'll start with a slight correction from my original post: one of the movies is Star Wario, not Starring Wario. That makes more sense, since it's actually a movie title pun. Can't believe I didn't make the connection until just now.

"I'm a-cryin' because Wario Land 4 is just... is a-just so... BEAUUUUUTIFUL!"

The exclusive stills and clips can be viewed by going to the Pyramid Theater (pictured above). In addition, there's Wario's Arcade, where you can play some games (all of which are also playable at BooMansion.net) and earn Wario Bucks...

"Sure, you're old enough, but are you BOLD enough?"

Greed School (or Greed $chool), where you can read an old Mario vs Wario comic and take a test to see how much you know about Wario Land 4...

"It's about time you learned something really useful!"

The Post Office, where you could subscribe to Nintendo Power...

A moment of silence... Okay, long enough. "I'm-a so cool! Hey!"

And Wario Mart, where you can spend your Wario Bucks on screensavers, wallpapers, a print-out fold-up car, and strategies for Wario Land 4 itself.

"The best! YOU can trust ME..."

In Greedville itself, there's also a statue you can click on, which causes Wario to sing his name in the style of "Figaro", and then cough.

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"

As for the movies, I still wish I could see them again. Again, they're called "Star Wario" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wario", and are wario1.mov and wario2.mov, respectively.

And that's about it. Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm still alive. My Spell-It Plus review should be coming later this week, I hope. After I'm done with that one, I have a few more computer games lined up, then some old tapes and a record I had as a kid, and finally, a book. For some reason I don't feel like being specific right now. I'll get to them when I get to them, but for now, I'm outta here. Next time, Spell-It Plus! for Macintosh. See ya then!

-Johnny

NumberMaze (at last)

I'm finally back, and I'm finally making that post about NumberMaze. I have fond memories of this game, because much like Learning Voyage, it was included in Classworks Gold. Also like Learning Voyage, I re-discovered it recently thanks to the power of Google.

Now, NumberMaze is not quite as obscure as Learning Voyage, by which I mean people other than me remember it. However, I still count it as a pretty obscure game, because it's not well-known by a large number of people. That may change soon, because a certain YouTube celebrity owns a copy and has told me that he may review it at some point. And during all of April, he's reviewing edutainment games.

But to him I say, "Ha! I beat you to it!" (Please note that I like the guy in question, and I respect his work.)

Now, onto the game itself. NumberMaze was made by Great Wave Software and released for the IBM PC/compatibles and the Macintosh in 1988 and 1990, with an updated re-release sometime in the mid-to-late 90's, adding support for Windows in addition to enhanced graphics and sound. There were other games in the series as well, such as Reading Maze, Decimal & Fraction Maze, and a sequel called NumberMaze Challenge (which was NOT used in Classworks, contrary to what I had said in an earlier post).

The game starts off with a name selection screen. As with a lot of edutainment games, you either choose from a list of names or add a new entry for yourself. When you add a new entry, there's also an option for a password.

No idea what the password does, by the way.

After selecting your name, the game (Mac version for me) opens with some beautiful PCM audio, followed by a beeping rendition of "Dance of the Reed Pipes" from the Nutcracker Suite.

So. Much. Nostalgia.

After this, you are greeted with the maze itself. Now, most of my screenshots feature a race car, but that's just because the computer kept choosing the race car. You can also get a horse, a mouse, and I think a few others, but I can't remember them now.

It's a-maze-ing... that I'm using that overused pun.

Your goal is to make it to the castle at the end of the maze, but since you're surrounded by walls, that's impossible, right? Wrong! See those yellow walls? Touch them with your game piece (I think that's what they call it), and you're greeted with a counting problem (on the first levels, anyway).

Suddenly I'm hungry for strawberries.

After you type in the correct answer, you'll get a piece of something to get past the obstacle (usually a ladder or staircase of some kind, although occasionally you'll have to open a locked door or clear away some rubble, and every so often the wall itself will open up).

Not pictured: the fact that this was on Counting B.

After you make it to the castle, it opens up and you're greeted with a screen showing the contents of your castle, and a beeping rendition of another song from the Nutcracker Suite, "Russian Dance" (also known as Danse Russe). For some reason, you don't get anything added to the castle after beating the first level, so you move on to the second level.

Not pictured: anything in the castle.

Now some of the walls are blue. These are locked walls. You need to move your game piece over to a key, then unlock one of the walls with it. After this, you can touch the wall and solve math problems like normal.

They're blue, da ba dee, da ba die...

Beating the second level actually does give you something to add to the castle.

Your swords are enough.

After answering enough problems, you get a certificate saying that you're a total math nerd... er, saying that you've cleared the difficulty level you were on. You can print it if you still have an old computer and an old printer, but printing from an older OS is difficult when you use an emulator like I do.

Um... count the strawberries?

The third level spices things up a bit more: you have to collect books in order to get rid of the walls surrounding the castle before you can actually get to it.

Don't ask me how books can get rid of walls.

And that's about it. Rinse and repeat. I'm pretty sure you eventually move on to different subjects for the problems (I think addition is one, and I know it also has everyone's favorite: word problems). Unfortunately, I got pretty bored by this point, and I didn't want to play any more... at least not for the blog. There may be an ending. Who knows? I don't.

Oh yeah, I should also mention a few things: the version I used for this review is in color (duh) and doesn't talk. There's also a talking version, at least for the Mac. The Mac version of Talking NumberMaze uses the built-in MacinTalk voices. There's also a monochrome version, and the color version may appear in monochrome if you don't set the colors properly (16 colors). Also, since it's such an old game, I recommend using Basilisk II rather than SheepShaver.

Let me tell you also, this game was a pain to get working properly. I would love to own a physical copy, but it's rare and demands a ridiculous price on Amazon. I am very jealous of the YouTube celebrity I mentioned earlier.

But that's neither here nor there. I need to mention something before I go: I'm actually not running out of obscure computer games! The next one that I have planned is the Mac version of Davidson's Spell-It Plus. Hopefully I'll remember the others I had in mind relatively soon. Anyways, see ya then!

-Johnny

Old Websites and the Internet Archive

I know, I know, you were expecting NumberMaze today. Don't worry, it's coming, but first I wanted to talk about old websites.

There's this organization called the Internet Archive. You may have heard of them recently for adding a bunch of old MS-DOS games and arcade games that you can play in your browser. However, before they were known for that, they made this thing called the Wayback Machine. This allows you to browse old websites as they looked back in the day.

Now, even though the thing has been around for years, it's still far from complete. There are a bunch of obscure websites that are either not archived at all, or not archived completely. This is what I wanted to talk about today.

I'll start off by talking about websites for old video games, specifically Nintendo games (so no pictures for them, sorry). The first one I'm gonna mention is the site for Wario Land 4. Visiting the site starts you off with a loading screen that's very reminiscent of the famous Super Mario Land 2 commercial (although Wario doesn't actually say "Obey Wario, destroy Mario!").

Wario greets you by saying, "Welcome to my town! Elegant, lovely, ain't it? Come on, time's a-wasting! Enter one of my faaaaaaaaantastic attractions! Heh heh heh heh heh heh!" If you click on him, he'll say "What do I look like, some kind of [indistinguishable]?"

Some of the more memorable parts for me were the games and the movies. The games are all playable on boomansion.net, but sadly, it seems that no one else remembers the movies, and they were removed even before the site itself was removed. The movies were "Starring Wario" (wario1.mov), and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wario" (wario2.mov).

The other Nintendo website I remember was the one for WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgames. It contained fan-submitted games, as well as a few original games; a map of Diamond City; and an interview with Wario himself about his new game. As you played games, if you won you would receive three diamonds, and if you lost you would lose three diamonds, with Wario saying "The Wario giveth, and the Wario taketh away. So there!"

Related to that, there was the WarioWare Mega Party Games website. This one was actually divided up into different areas, and you would have to (I think) find keys to unlock doors so that you could unlock other content.

Nintendo had a TON of websites, and it would take too long to go through them all here. But the most obscure website that I can think of that I remember would have to be the old website for the Blaster games, blasternaut.com. You start out at a menu with a few options: the only two I remember are Blaster's Universe (which I'll get to in a bit) and one that let you play a demo of the Math Blaster game from that time.

The Blaster's Universe option played a song (not the theme song for Blaster's Universe, interestingly) and then you'd receive a transmission from Illitera, the antagonist from Reading Blaster. She informs you that she's kidnapped MEL, and challenges you to find him. To do this, you have to visit three different planets.

One of them takes you to a platforming game. I'm a sucker for platformers, so I loved this one (I'd probably hate it now, though). Next is an Asteroids clone. Finally, you'd have a code-breaking challenge; that was probably the only game that actually had some educational value, interestingly enough. After each game, you find out something about "the Hidden Planet".

Then the Hidden Planet is revealed, and you discover that this is where Illitera has taken MEL. You have to put MEL back together, but this is no easy task. This was the most confusing of the games, because you had no real clue what you were supposed to put where. The only hint was "Listen to what MEL has to say when you put a piece in", but this was unhelpful. He would either spout some scientific/mathematical nonsense, or he'd sing "I'm a Little Teapot". Yes, really. And no, this didn't help at all.

Once you put him back together, you take him back to the ship, where you discover that he's been reprogrammed. His eyes get wide...

MEL, are you okay?

Then they get all swirly and Illitera taunts you, saying that "You'll sit, stay, and beg once you find out what I've got planned!"

"...Just as soon as I beat my high score."

She laughs and... that's it. You then get a chance to play the games on a higher difficulty. I never actually did this, but I would assume that you would get to tie off the story by doing this.

Sadly, the screenshots I have here are the only things that remain of this site. The Wayback Machine only has a "You need Flash 5" page, even when you have the latest version of Flash installed. My theory is that it does this because it's trying to load the contents of the main page, but it can't, and the website assumes that it can't load it because it can't render it because it doesn't have Flash, so it throws up that screen.

I could go on about old nostalgic (and obscure) websites that aren't archived, but I think I've said enough for now. So, anyone else remember these websites? What other old websites do you remember? Any websites you'd recommend I visit on the Wayback Machine? Please let me know, as I'd be very interested to see what you guys remember.

Here's a video to go along with this post (I made it before writing the post, and decided in the middle that it was relevant to the blog).

Next time, I'm actually gonna talk about NumberMaze. For real, I promise.

-Johnny

Finally Getting Around to Stuff

I apologize once again for not having a post in a long time. See, this is why I don't like to make promises: stuff comes up and I can't actually get around to it. With me being in school, I haven't had time to make a blog post. But this will change. My schedule will be much less hectic this week than it has been for a while. Which means...

At long last, I will make a post on KidPhonics! ...Or at least I would, if I would have a lot to say about it. But I don't. Honestly, I played it a few times and realized: it's boring. Like, really, really boring. So boring I wouldn't even play it for the nostalgia.

So with that out of the way, I'll give any additional basic thoughts here (no pictures because I'm lazy, sorry). The "Sound Buster" game is probably the most fun, just because you get to hear the "busters" talk in amusing accents. The "Word Builder" game--which is a part of the Sound Buster game too, by the way--is pretty boring. Build the right word, then make a nonsensical sentence. That's about it. The songs (yes, there are songs) are incredibly annoying. I especially despise the "cowboy" song, sung by a Pat Buttram wannabe.

So that's KidPhonics. Next will be, as I promised, NumberMaze. And boy oh boy, that's gonna be a fun one. After that, I've sort of run out of obscure computer and video games to cover, so I'll either be taking yet another hiatus or I'll move on to different media.

Like music. I've got a few things of music lined up, but because of copyright, I may not be able to do all of them. This is unfortunate, but true. I say this because I know that for one of the ones I want to cover, the company that made the songs still exists, and you can actually buy some of them on iTunes. On the other hand though, I still want to talk about the songs because they're absolutely ridiculous.

As for the others, well, you'll see. Or hear, in this case. One of them may (probably will) surprise you. But that's for another time. Next time, it's NumberMaze. Catch ya later!

-Johnny

Apologies

I'm going to start by saying I'm sorry for missing last week. I simply had too many other things to do, and they were all school-related. I'm shooting for the KidPhonics review for some time later this week, and then after that, I'm going to do a review of yet another Mac game, NumberMaze by Great Wave Software. My good friend Luke will probably be looking forward to that one, as he told me he's played the sequel, NumberMaze Challenge.

Now, as for when I'll be doing these posts... I'm going to shoot for the middle of the week for KidPhonics, and weekend for NumberMaze, to make up for missing last week. No promises this time though.

After that, I'm... not really sure what else I could do. I do have a few ideas, but they would require more extensive reviews (read: more time than just a week), so I'm open to suggestions. I'll post a list of guidelines when I get around to it, but as a general rule of thumb, I'm limiting it to computer and video games that are available in digital format, and abandonware only.

But yes, I am going to find the time to do a review of KidPhonics this week, and like I said, I'm going to try to do a review of NumberMaze as well, but no guarantees. If I can't this week, then I'll do it next week for sure. So take care, and I'll see ya then!

-Johnny