Well, get yourself a three-ring binder and some loose leaf, because Madcap's gonna take you back to school!
...quit your griping, you gotta learn something.
A quick search of the internet (and, by internet, I mean I checked the Wikipedia page), I learned that the route that starts in Missouri (which loves company) and heads out west was actually first and most commonly used by the mountain men of the 1830s who were heavily into the fur trade and sought streams where beavers would be plentiful. However, forget about that because it has little to nothing to do with what it became which was a route West in order to seek gold and other opportunities in the golden land of Aquilonia...I mean, California. After James Marshall found gold and the California Gold Rush was sparked, a mass exodus occurred as many a folk were closing up their shops, packing up their families, and leaving their homes to go to the new Land of Opportunity.
And, as this game demonstrates, many of them died in gory, horrendous, and painful ways without ever making it to their destinations.
The game sees the player dropped into 1848, at the height of the prominence of the Trail. Starting from the town of Independence, Missouri, the player must buy supplies and travel out with four other individuals to California. On the way, you'll face the dangers of the open road in the 1840s. These include, but are not limited to: cholera, dysentery, having your wagon being set on fire, having your oxen wander off, having your oxen die, drowning in a river, losing all your supplies in a river, snakebites, having someone steal things out of your wagon, being caught in a blizzard if you leave too early in the year, being caught in a blizzard if you leave too late in the year, and much, much more.
And here's the worst part: there's nothing you can do about it.
Picture being a child, about seven or eight years old sitting in a computer lab at your school and then suddenly a message pops up smack in the middle of the interface that tells you that someone in your group has died, with the image of some individuals mourning over a fresh grave while the funeral march blares at you through the speakers - with literally all the subtlety of a nine millimeter round through the skull.
Y'know, forget Dark Souls. You wanna be a man? You wanna show that you've got a giant ballsack to make Chuck Norris look like his is like a prepubescent boy's who was in the pool too long? You get through The Oregon Trail as a teacher and then you come to me with your testosterone-filled BS. You think taking on Gwyn, Lord of Cinders makes you a man? You go tangle with one person with dysentery, one person with cholera, and another person with a broken arm while you've got the elements themselves coming to wreck your day while you're running low on food, you have one ox left, and you're not even halfway through your journey. Until then? You are no man!
I cannot stress enough how completely distraught this made me when I was a kid, horrified as I watched person after person from my group die off before I'd even made it a quarter of the way through the game. The game will randomly bring up ailments for people in the party, including your character, such as disease and limb breakage. In adverse conditions, very few of which you can actually control, characters will die quickly if they're crippled or diseased. The deaths seem to come just as much at random as the diseases that precede them and it cultivates a sense of dread and hopelessness as you watch people who were in your group die off one by one.
Oh, and if you die, it's an automatic game over.
And again, you have no control over when these things happen and if you either get cured or die. The game chooses, and is plenty happy to rub it in your face. Perhaps this was the attempt by the gamemakers to make the player feel but a fraction of the horror that the pioneers heading out to the West felt, and I'd have to say they managed that masterfully. Considering the state of the world back then, lack of medicinal knowledge and the elements along meant these people had some serious testicular fortitude in even attempting this.
Speaking of medicinal knowledge, the player has a choice of professions that they had before travelling out West, each of which affords the player a bonus of some kind. Bankers start out with an insane amount of money, blacksmiths have a better chance of their wagon not breaking down and being able to repair it more efficiently if they do. Then you have professions such as Teacher, which awards no perks at the beginning but greatly increases the number of multipliers the player gets to their score upon reaching Willamette Valley in Oregon...provided that you ever actually do. The best strategy I've worked out is to pick Doctor, so your people have a better chance of staying alive and in decent health until the end. But, again, the game will still more than occasionally just shove one up hard and you just have to take it.
The interface remains the same throughout the game, a picture that takes up about a fourth of the screen showing the towns and forts you visit along the way as most of the time you'll see your little wagon making it's way forever from the right side of that screen to the left. A click of a button can see you trade and talk with fellow wagoneers, rest (a crucial tactic in completely wasting time...and fighting off occasional bits of exhaustion), checking your group's status, controlling how much everyone eats, setting the pace of your trip (which can have adverse conditions on everyone's health), and buying things at forts.
Also a map that you'll never use. Even when the group "loses the trail", just wait a bit and the game will put you right back on it.
Also a guide book, which you'll also never use.
The name of the game is continuing to move, keeping your people alive, and making sure you don't run out of food, especially if you start too early and get pummeled with blizzards. You may not go full Donner Party on one another...mostly because you'll be dead long before that becomes a problem. Out on the road, your best - and, indeed, only - option for food is hunting, which brings you into a nice little mini-game. You're shown a field and can switch to several different viewpoints in the area, eight in total, From there, it becomes pretty much as simple as point and click to kill any animals that come into your path. The further they are away from your position, however, the more I would advise aim your shot for where your target is going to be instead of where they are.
Your options for game are fairly simplistic - squirrels, rabbits, deer, bears, and buffalo. The bears and buffalo are the slowest moving, and yield the most meat. Once you figure that out, you naturally go for that and take them out as soon as you see them and not even bother going for the faster-moving rodents. Unfortunately, the game only lets you take back about two hundred pounds and won't let you hold more than two thousand points in the wagon at a time. Also, don't spam hunting in the areas where you can, because eventually the game will warn you that if you keep doing so, food will be scarce. If it tells you that after your first hunt, move on for a bit and then try again.
And that's really all there is to it. Don't die, keep moving West, and remember to eat. It's brain dead simplistic, and really only takes about twenty to thirty minutes to play through, provided you don't die. So why has it endured for as long as it has? And in so many incarnations? Honestly, I think it's because it's addicting as all get out. I question it's use as an educational tool, mostly because what I knew about the era I knew from history class and didn't really learn anything new from playing it (like I said, you're never going to use the guide book).
In the end, though, the Oregon Trail was meant to teach the little children about life back in that time, and the execution of one of the greatest undertakings in American history. And it did that. This game in particular taught my generation that everything in the 1840s was trying to kill you if you left home. That's probably why there are so many of us locked up in our homes typing out rants about video games on the internet.
The Oregon Trail Deluxe comes to us from MECC, and has various incarnations available on Android, Apple II, iOS, Macintosh, BlackBerry, Commodore 64, DOS, Facebook, Java ME, Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS, Wii, Windows, Mobile, and Phone 7.
If you'd like to recreate your own traumatizing childhood memories, or you just want to see what all the fuss was about, click here.
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