So what do Americans do with people they really like?

Its only an honor that we bestow on those we like (to see suffer) the most!

Oh, so my limitless admiration of the everything American finally payed off? Great

Besides, Creosote is an honorary American

Ah, I thought you were replying to the part about being in all american schools. My bad.

Eh, well, you stripped out the important context of the quote:





So, I hope it's now clear that I was trying to say it was 'most certainly not the same in Europe'

I can pretty much agree with every game on that list, except the damned baseball one.

Oregon trail is pure awesomness. It's hard to judge how good it is if you haven't played it until recently, but if you had played it in it's day you would agree that it is a very good game. It had challenging (for it's age bracket) strategy elements (such as what supplies to buy at the outset & how much of each, how fast to travel, what rations to set, whether to ford a given river or wait for a boat, etc) and it also had a few action elements (like hunting for food & the river race at the end). Most of the kids I knew played it primarily for the hunting part.



Dude... You're german. As tuss said, every school IN AMERICA had it, not every school in the world.

re math games: There were 2 good ones in my schools, math(trash?) blaster & number munchers. In math blasters you had math formulas in a factory kind of setting & had to solve them to fuel up your space fighter. Once it was fully fueled, you went out into space & blew up space debris for points.
Number munchers was sort of like pacman. You were on a grid full of math problems & had to eat all the ones that totalled a given ammount. There were monsters that would come out at random & change the equations. If you ate a wrong equation or landed on the same square as a monster you lost a life, the exception is if a monster landed on a correct equation, then you could eat the monster & equation at the same time. (One common strat was to sit on a correct square & wait till the monster came to you before eating it.)

People here are always discussing why kids aren't interested in maths and how to motivate them more. The abstract answer you hear most is 'make it clear to them how useful it is'. If that's not the perfect argument...

In my school we had the Adibou games, well, more like exercise programs for what I recall, and some other educative games I've never seen again, like one where you had to flee from a dungeon solving mathematics problems, and if you took too long a dragon would come.

Most certainly not! I had never even heard of that game before this millenium. At my school, we had Ökolopoly For obvious reasons ('colonization' not playing a serious part in history classes), Oregon Trail would have been of little interest.

Same reasoning with the Baseball game, I guess. If that had been a European list, it probably would have been Kick Off.


Nicely spotted It's indeed from The Keep!

Looking through the games, it seems that one of Elwood's screenshots got into the Wizardry article!

Explaining Oregon Trail is pretty easy. Every computer in every school in America had, for whatever reason, a copy of Oregon Trail installed, and a word processor. This is pretty much the choice you had at school. Probably nearly every American around my age played that game in a time when not that many people had a computer. I'm not sure if it was the same in Europe or not...

GameSpy ran a list of 'their' top 20 games of the 1980s over the last few days, wrapping it up today (or last night - whatever).

Compared to most of the other comparable lists linked here, I must say I actually like this one. Yes, sure, the individual choices can always be discussed, but they don't even claim otherwise (unlike some certain 'definitive' lists....). If asked, I'd certainly object to the inclusion of the Baseball game (very 'American' choice) and Oregon Trail (on the one hand, nice to see an educational game included, on the other hand, certainly not that good). But as I said, it doesn't really matter.

Looking at the big picture, it indeed looks like a list of very good and at times extremely influential games. There are small descriptions of the games, not just a listing. And as you'll notice, they use the classic definition of 'PC' there, i.e. not restricting it to IBM compatibles. Good thing there isn't such an arbitrary restriction.