The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail






A classic educational computer game, developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971. The player is on his journey as he guides the settlers on a wagon from Missouri  to Oregon. As days pass by during their long journey, they would encounter several obstacles which would affect their time spent and their health conditions in their travel.



Objective

Survive and complete your travel to Oregon.



 Game description

Before you start your journey to Oregon, you’ll need some basic resources to be able to survive during the days you would be traveling. You are given a certain amount of money for you to spend wisely on the resources you are going to need further on. Such as, food, clothing, replacements for the wagon, ammunition for your hunting which would further on be very important for you in the game. Your travel would be affected depending on your initial choices you’ll before you head out.

Now that you have decided to start the travel, as the days pass by, your food supply would reduce and there would be times you’ll have to hunt for food to be able to continue your travel. You’ll encounter other obstacles such as coring rivers, theefs, sickness, weather, need for more wagon replacements, need for money and much more.

Game Mechanics

A lot of decision making was involved from the beginning towards the end of the game. Every single choice made during the game was very important, in able for you to finish the game. A game of exploration, a quest filled with obstacles preventing you from arriving in a short time to accomplish the games’ objective.





Game experience

At my first purchase of supplies, not much money was left because I bought the amount of items which the game recommended. I headed out at my first attempt and it seemed pretty easy at the start. As I moved on, I haven’t worried for a while about my food supply until I saw there were a couple pounds left for us to consume. So I went for a hunt, which at first was not very easy, but luckily after several attempts, I got the hang of it. I was near halfway through the trip but things got very complicated and eventually I didn’t managed to survive. So I decided to start again. Now  I had an idea about the obstacles I were to encounter, so I saved up more money because I noticed it was going to be very useful within the journey.

Personal opinion

Overall, the game was entertaining. I consider the game to be educative in a certain way, because of the constant decision making you will have to encounter within your travel, in able to complete the game. A little bit of U.S. history facts were involved during the game. There were several aspects about the game which didn’t satisfy me that much. The graphics were not the best and I had some lag issues. The game froze several times and there were some times that I had to reload the page again causing this to restart the game. I didn’t feel comfortable with the settings when it came to hunting. Mainly because I couldn’t just hold a button to move. I had to click one to start moving then move with the arrow keys and if were to stop, I had to click the same button I started with.