Talk about school computer games, dagnabbit.

i played number munchers and oregon trail in grade school. the first time i saw half life was installed on a school computer in 1998. i also took a keyboarding class in high school even though i was already an extremely fast typer. i would complete the assignments and spend the rest of the class playing dxball2.

>>11883043
If this wasn't the 2nd game people brought up I was gonna LOSE MY SHIT.

Does encarta count?

>>11883035 (OP)
I'm a Treasure MathStorm! chad myself
>>11883065
hell yeah it does

>>11883035 (OP)
I remember all the little redneck kids in my class would spent all their money on bullets and spend the entire computer lab hour hunting. It’s also funny how wasteful you are in this game. “You killed 800 pounds of buffalo but only took 100 back to the wagon.”

Nanosaur

>>11883078
Was there supposed to be a wagon upgrade or something..?

>>11883141
It was so easy to get infinite money in this game by hiring NEGATIVE employees.

>>11883174
Really? Played the mac version at school and I didn't know you could do this.

Remember playing the shit out of this in school

>>11883141
based, this was a favorite when we actually got the chance toe play it in school. I remember in school going in the lab and they had just gotten two iMac's and there were a few games that I cant find. One you drove around and delivered pizza around a city, sort of like GTA and GTA 2 top down view.
The other was a 3d dino game, I think you were collecting eggs or something. I only saw this game once during a lunch when I went into lab.
In high school we spent a lot of time playing Star Craft Fastest possible map. and runescape (classic)

We had a brand new school, with an incredible shop with fancy new tools. They couldn't find a teacher qualified to teach shop, so we got to play this instead.

>>11883274
If you clicked backwards on the thing it would sometimes go past zero in the other direction. No idea what made it possible sometimes and other times not.

>>11883365
https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1753026280254035.mp4

>>11883035 (OP)

Millie's Math House, Math Circus were some that I played a lot in my 1st grade's class computer, Kid Pix was a really cool art program also. This must have been sometime in the early or mid 90s. We were a very small class so every kid got a chance to use the computer each day. Miss Summers was an awesome teacher, thank you for unlocking some core-memories OP.

The grade school series also Mavis teaching series I believe it went to 6th grade? -or primary school.

Putt Putt Joins the Parade was big at my school

Played this one a lot.

>>11883130
No, I just don't think they wanted you maxing out your food stores after 1 hunting trip.

>>11883130
It was commentary on how the white man resulted in fewer buffalo. We know buffalo were overhunted, but people have been guessing about the specifics for years. The usual assumption is "white men are greedy and wasteful assholes," so you get depictions like in Dances with Wolves, where buffalo are killed only for their skins and the meat is left to rot. As far as we know this DID happen, but not until ~1870, which is to say, after a railroad was built in 1869 which made the Trail obsolete. Anyway, almost half a million people went west at the time, and people need a lot of food for months-long travel by foot and wagon. I think it's safe to say that, even ignoring the assholes who killed buffalo for sport, their numbers were bound to go down.
And yes, the "American Buffalo" is a species of bison.

I'd also assume at least some of it is game balance, like >>11883605 says.

>>11883035 (OP)
I feel dread when I watch game play videos of math blaster, reading blaster, jumpstart etc. At the time I was playing Outcast, Dark Forces 2, Baldurs Gate... But my parents put a time limit on all games except these edutainment ones. I'd just want to play a game, so I'd sit there and drag through the blaster games. I was so bored during it all. Seeing anything related to these games make me feel it all over again .

>>11883789
I liked the jumpstart games.

>>11883874
It's crazy because this is NOT how my child brain saw these games. Watching now they are like animated slideshows. If I look back into the archives of my mind I'll swear there was a REAL DOG watching me play cafeteria lady as I give a child a Whole Tray of Peas.

KID PIX STUDIO DELUXE
READ, WRITE, AND TYPE!

For me, it was Gizmos & Gadgets

>>11883371
holy shit this slaps!

>>11883035 (OP)
Mostly we had boring stuff or the classics like Oregon Trail, but one year somebody installed The Incredible Machine on all of the computers in the lab and pretty much the entire 4th/5th grade class blew a million hours playing it.

I remember playing a game that had a car going around a racetrack, and words would pop up on the track and you had to type the word to remove it before you crashed.

Another one had a bunch of ants on a football field. Don't remember much more than that.

This would have been approximately 1989-1990. Anybody know what two games these are? I'd recognize them immediately if anybody has screenshots

>Be 12, inherit a bunch of edu-games from my older cousin.
>Math Blaster is pretty cool, hear it has an expansion pack.
>Write to Santa for it for Christmas.
>Never solve a single question in it.

>>11884734
mavis beacon teaches typing or jumpstart typing

>Blaster pals
as a kid I would go in the computer lab and play the alphabet jam so I could watch the girl one shake her ass, those were some of my first boners

>>11883078
Why does everyone on the internet seem to remember this fucked up game boy color version of Oregon Trail or whatever and never the actual true nostalgic original Oregon Trail I grew up with (pic related)?

>>11885615
Because you're a zoomer who played it on Windows in the 2000s. Most Oregon Trail players played on Apple II, Monochrome Macintosh, or PC compatible

>>11885619
I'm a Millennial born in 1989 and played Oregon Trail in the 90s on Windows 95.

did edutainment teach kids anything?

>>11885574
Unfortunately neither are it, the graphics in my game were way more primitive, likely pre-8bit. I believe they were IBM computers

>>11883035 (OP)
My private school (which was more like pricey special-ed) got in a new computer and it came with MegaRace. Needless to say, there was always a crowd for that.
>MFW I can still quote much of Lance Boyle from memory

>>11884110

Not exactly a game, but I played around in Hyper Studio a lot.

playing Bolo networked with frens over AppleTalk on the Macs.

>>11883065
What's the most soulful version? I had 97 growing up.

There was some 3D tank game, like wireframe 3D. We could only rarely play it so it seemed awesome. Wish I could find out what it was. There's similar looking stuff but nothing looks exactly how I remember it.

It was probably just Battlezone, but I'll never be sure.

>>11885664
IBM Touch Typing for Beginners 2.0

>>11885649
Gizmos and Gadgets taught me the differences amongst mechanical, electrical, and chemical energy, and examples of simple machines several years before any science class did.
SimCity 2000 taught me what bonds are and why going into debt to pay off expenses is a very bad idea.
Word '97 taught me to refrain from writing sentences in passive voice.

>>11885861
That sure just looks like Battlezone with vaporwave colors.

>>11885861
It is Battlezone. I remember playing this version on my family's crappy 286 clone with CGA graphics.

if you were ever in a school computer lab in the late 90s theres an excellent chance you played games on candystand.com. was it macromedia shockwave? or flash? cant remember

>>11886241
pretty sure shockwave and flash were the same thing, at one point it was just called "shockwave flash"
the shockwave website was basically candystand 1.0 with flash games

>>11886225
>>11886234
The picture is Battlezone, of course. I just chose it to represent the game I'm talking about. I don't have a screenshot of whatever game I played as a kid. Battlezone is most likely it though.

>>11886241
I remember candystand being the few game sites that wasn't blocked at school and wasn't email walled

Used to play CrossCountry USA in the computer lab all the time.

>>11883035 (OP)
I remember it being some graphic adventure with text parser
I can't remember the name but you were in a castle and needed to jump down a well at some point
I think you needed to find a carrot because later in the game you needed to read some sign far away and if you ate the carrot you got super vision

>>11885615
>why do people remember the original more than the remake?
more exposure likely

>>11885562
is that a real screenshot wtf

Wish I could remember the software my school used. I remember only using a couple of times, but it was pretty fun :-(

>>11885615
I grew up with Oregon Trail 2. I can't remember what year we got it but it wasn't long after it's launch.

>>11887762
I recently revisited this game and beat it, imo it still holds up great and i love the way it looks and sounds. We got our first computer in late 1995. It was a Gateway with windows 95 on it. My parents would occasionally get me games for it, early on it was this, what came on the computer and this frog spelling game i've never found the name of. a bit later i got several of the magic the school bus games. now those were fantastic as a kid. everythign you clicked on did something interesting.

>>11887770
forgot to post the second picture

>>11883035 (OP)
Storybook Weaver. On computer day (which was once a week or every other week at the library in Elementary School in the 90s, we would usually get to play a game. Typically this was Super Wordmuncher, Math Blaster, or Storybook Weaver. I knew this game existed, I remembered it, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called until this thread inspired me to go looking for it again. Everyone just used the picture mode to decorate a scene.

>>11885615
It's the apple ii version, and it's the version that kids played in the 80s. The whole nostalgia for edutainment shit post Apple ii/Carmen Sandiego is a relatively recent thing.

>>11884071

>>11883035 (OP)

Someone left this on our Acorn Archimedes in Primary School. Lots of 'research' done during computer lessons.

I liked the jumpstart games and the reading and math blaster games.

>>11887762
This is the one I grew up with as well. It came with our 1997 HP Pavilion. Kinda blew my mind to learn what the original looked like.

There was one “game” my parents got me that I have been searching for: I distinctly remember there was a coon (raccoon variant) who ran through various screens to the William Tell Overture and you answered multiplication problems. The more you answered, the farther he went. It was like one question per frame of animation and there were thousands of problems. Or what seemed like thousands.

It’s been bugging me, I can’t remember the name. It was CD-ROM and I’m in my 40s, it was a very early CD-ROM game.

Here in France we had Troglodi. Couldn't find a better picture sorrgy.

>>11883078
>>11883718
>It’s also funny how wasteful you are in this game. “You killed 800 pounds of buffalo but only took 100 back to the wagon
Yeah, that's definitely part of the covert educational nature of Oregon Trail, teaching kids how (and why) the buffalo were wastefully hunted. Do you track down the small, fast, hard to shoot rabbits for a couple pounds of meat at best, or go after the big, slow buffalo, which fills a large portionmef your meat stores, even though you're only able to use a fraction of their carcass?
It's easy to forget that Oregon Trail was marketed as an educational game.
>>11885615
>>11885626
Probably because a lot of public schools avoided getting new computers for as long as possible, or when they did upgrade, were upgrading to computers which were themselves already outdated. I was born in 88 and for most of my elementary school years we had a pre-Windows version of Oregon Trail, probably the DOS version.
I think by the time I was in 5th grade they had Yukon Trail

>thinly veiled oregon trail thread
i sucked at that game and am proud of it

>>11885861
Spectre

>>11883043
Math Dodger

>>11883917
>>11883874
Holy shit that stupid song
When you have like 10 kids all starting that stupid song in intervals it basically sounds like mcmangos

>>11888049
I mean, let's be honest, it's one of the few edutainment games that still holds up playing it as an adult. Most others are only worth revisiting for the fond memories and little else.

>>11886528
i live in canada so we had Cross Country Canada instead, and the PCs were 286s so it was a CGA DOS version
only time i really had fun with it was the time i made all the deliveries by taking the longest route while never stopping for gas, food or sleep to see how high a bill i could rack up with the constant crashing and paying tow trucks for gas

>>11888171
Yeah! That looks closer. It was probably Spectre.

>>11884083
Fuck this game. There was never enough time to progress

>>11888041
My school still had Oregon Trail running on Apple IIs in 1999

im a zoomer and in middle school we played this FPS game called DimensionM. It has VS gamemodes where two teams would compete to complete objectives that required solving algebra equations to finish. It was actually really fun, imagine a class with a school sanctioned LAN party in halo, but to cap the flag you had solve an equation.

>>11889127
When I was in high school I took a programming class where Half-Life Deathmatch, Counter-Strike, and Soldat were installed on every PC, so any time we were all done early we just played those games with the teacher's permission.

>>11889164
My programming class in high school was the same way. We could work at our own pace, so barely anybody did any work until the end of the semester. So mostly people played games or watched flash videos.

>>11889164
so im the zoomer from >>11889127 and we also played halo ce and counter-strike 1.6 but we had to bring our own copies. there was also a school monitoring software but i found it was really easy to remove but just booting into linux and deleting the executable file from the drive.

>>11889179
What year were you born?

>>11888041
Fuck yeah, Yukon Trail. Out of all the playthroughs I had, only once did I manage to get to the lake before it froze over, and preempt everybody else taking the good claim.
Africa Trail, on the other hand... What the fuck were they thinking? I don't think I've ever gotten to the end of it, because the game will just suddenly tell you, "We've decided you won't make it in time. Game over."

>>11888846
In my class, we figured out some specific way of phrasing "sleep with hooker" that would not be rejected, but would instead return the message, "You toss and turn, and are unable to sleep." We thought this was HILARIOUS.

>>11889226
2001

this and Keen Dreams (the one with the potatoes)

I played Descent with another kid on the school computer. He moved the ship while I shot enemies because I was too braindead to know how to maneuver.

>>11883035 (OP)
If school subjects were designed around playing video games, I probably would have learned a lot more. My reading and writing were already far and away superior to the rest of the kids at my level because I played more story-oriented video games.

My hearing is shit, and this game had no subtitles, so a TSA wore the headphones and told me what Lynne Thigpen was saying to the player.

>>11883043
>dxball2
Holy shit.

>>11890385
Most boys are like this.
The entire way school is designed, is basically for girls and how THEY excel.

>>11883043
>the first time i saw half life was installed on a school computer in 1998.
Same story, but for me it was Age of Empires 2.
I deeply enjoyed it.
Having no idea how it would remain relevant like 20 years later.

>>11886528
>>11888846
these were great games and brilliant in that they prepared less studious children for their future in monotonous blue collar work. What a realistic take on education.

>>11886241
Yahoo had games too. Macromedia. Played this shit out of golf and there was chat rooms for every game.

>>11883043
>>11890584

There was a sweet spot in UK schools between about 1998-2001 where the schools were on a network but didn't yet have dedicated administrators outside of the IT teachers. Lots of crazy shit went on, but it also was surprisingly quite easy to install software.