Game Review: Oregon Trail

This is probably the earliest game I'm going to review on my blog, unless I do end up going back and replaying Below the Root (1984) or trying to get those last few points in Adventure (1977).

So, Oregon Trail. Played by millions of children who would go on to be the very first millennials. The game that launched a thousand memes, 999 of which are about dysentery and the last one is about fording the river and your oxen dying. It seems to me like it'd be a waste of space to spend any time explaining the game because surely everyone has played it, but of course that's not true at all. Exposure required a specific set of circumstances involving a bunch of Apple II computers all in one place and teachers who thought that Oregon Trail had some sort of educational value, which I suppose is true, since learning that life is horribly unfair and you will constantly be screwed by circumstances beyond your control is an important life lesson. As is the idea that the rich are literally playing on easy mode.

Why would a rich banker be heading to Oregon anyway?

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Oregon Vacation

I tend to write pretty detailed posts about my vacations because even though they're mostly only of interest to me, I like to have a record for when I go back and reread old posts. But this time I was gone for two weeks and, taking into account how verbose my blog posts tend to be, a detailed account of everything I did would run for 10,000 words and be exhausting to write, so I'm going to do what I did when we first moved to Japan and didn't have any internet and write a series of smaller segments and put them all in one post.
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