Elementary school computer games 1990s

The Super Nintendo and the Mario game inside fooled me. As the name suggests Mario has gone missing and Luigi has to go on a quest to find him. It feels like a cheap hack. Oh boy! Is this game about making battle droids and fighting off evil aliens? You have to learn how to balance the weight of the droids before they can take off.

How dare they. Not to be outdone by Mario, Sonic also has several education games. Sounds like a Shadow game, right? Unfortunately, it plays nothing like them. Imagine this as basically a digital tour through museum-like exhibits.

There are also learning stations with mini-games. Not sure how one could pay attention though. Everything is distractingly ugly. So if I hit three I would have to hit the number three, or objects gathered together in counts of three. If you get it wrong, you get a check against you. The platforming is stiff and the backgrounds are very uninspired. I learned it from D.

Gang peddlers are out to offer illegal stuff to Wally Bear and his friends. Your mission is to fight them off. It actually sends the wrong message because of how monotonous it is. Maybe doing some illegal substances would help ease the pain of playing. Mario's Time Machine? Well, hold your horses because this is not the time traveling Mario platformer you think and or hope it is. Instead it plays very similarly to Mario is Missing. Mario can plug in important dates into a time machine to then be warped to said period to learn about history.

It feels just as broken and fan-made as Mario is Missing. No, my odd possum friend, you are not. Saving the rainforest was all the rage in the 90s so the idea of a furry superhero fighting robots who are trying to destroy the environment sounds weird, but fun in an over the top way. Gameplay wise it tries to be like Sonic the Hedgehog only with a terrible frame rate. It is literally nauseating to play. Dinosaur games came out in droves in the 90s so of course there was going to be an educational title, or two in there.

So the premise is you have to platform through a polluted city, gathering inhalers to keep Bronkie alive. At the end of each stage, you get a little factoid about bronchitis.

I concede they picked a pretty good title for the game. Along the way, you try to catch elves with your elf-net.

Once caught, the feisty elves quiz you with a question, and if you get it right, they provide a clue that helps you find more treasure. Along the way, players learn mountaineering, unrestrained materialism, elf-kidnapping skills, and, of course, logical thinking. Castle of Dr. Brain is a whimsical, point-and-click, screen-based educational puzzle game with a first-person perspective. Sort of like Shadowgate with more robots and fewer mirrors.

In the game, you play as a prospective assistant to the eponymous Dr. Brain who seeks a path through the castle so you can win a contest. Spoiler Alert: You make through the castle, because Sierra released a similarly well-received sequel, The Island of Dr. Brain , in But it made sense for a generation of kids who grew up guiding Mario on console adventures, and they loved to learn with the help of their favorite mustachioed plumber.

If Rube Goldberg had designed a computer game, it would have been The Incredible Machine , a classic logical puzzler that incorporates mechanical knowledge and physics into a playful virtual sandbox. In the game, each stage presents the player with a challenge, such as get a ball into a basket.

Players must use the parts provided to assemble machine that gets the job done. This game taught kids how to make elaborate, impractical machines that would never work in real life. But it was still awesome. New Putt-Putt adventure games were put out every couple of years from the early '90s to the early '00s so there was never a shortage of challenges to try in computer lab. This game had some rockin' tunes. There was something so satisfying about watching Goofy break it down on the beach, even if his dance moves were limited.

The invention of the GPS certainly made the hours I spent planning truck routes across America seem pointless. Kat Pickhardt. View this post on. Sure, Mavis Beacon was a fictional character, but I like to think of her as my business mentor.

Kids apparently couldn't get enough educational space content back in the day! I'm not the best at vocabulary, so I guess you could say my muncher was on a diet!