South American Trek
NAME:
South American Trek
GAMEPLAY: No synonyms
AUTHOR:
Conrad Button
PLOT: Unintentionally funny
EMAIL:
?
ATMOSPHERE: Almost none
AVAILABILITY:
MS-DOS WRITING: Passable
PUZZLES:
Uninteresting
SUPPORTS: MS-DOS
CHARACTERS:
Unimportant
DIFFICULTY: Easy
South American Trek by Conrad Button is an educational text adventure designed to teach children about South American geography. The plot is a bizarre cross between a wasteful Federal pork program, and a college fraternity initiation.
You are sent by the President to spy on South America. But rather than seeking to learn about troop strengths or drug lord activity, your mission is to learn things like Venezuela's leading export, and the capital of Peru (a quick look in the atlas could have saved millions of taxpayer dollars).
You start on Devil's Island and must travel to South America by raft (here's where the fraternity-like stuff comes in). Once there, you wander around learning about the various countries and solving puzzles to try to acquire the item you need to signal the submarine waiting for you at Cape Horn. Once you've reached the sub, the captain will ask you six trivia questions about South America. If you get a question wrong, back you go. You have a maximum of three opportunities to get all six questions right.
The map scale varies tremendously. Some areas are no bigger than a temple or a mine shaft, others are the size of a city, or even an entire region.
But since South American Trek, or S.A.T. (appropriate acronym) is an educational game, we should not be asking whether its plot is plausible, but rather, whether or not it fulfills its goal of educating while making learning fun. Unfortunately, the answer is that it most certainly does not. The programming may have been good by 1986's shareware standards, but now or then, the game is worse than a month of detention.
Like all Buttonware text games, the 2-word parser is rock bottom. There are absolutely no synonyms for anything. If you try to refer to the " rowboat" as a " boat" , the game will not know what you are talking about. To make it even more confusing, some items are known only by their adjective. If you see " copper ore" , you must type " take copper" . " Take ore" will not work.
In addition, the map is especially confusing. Generally speaking, there are two ways that text game authors can make their map challenging. The first way is to change directions in transit. For example, suppose that you leave a room by going south, but must go west rather than north to return.
The second way is by varying the transit length. For example, look at the
following map:
E D C
A B
As you can see, the distance between A and B is longer than the distance between E and D. As a result, if you go from A to B first, you will probably draw a short line, and only after you have then gone to C, D, E, and A will you discover that the first line wasn't long enough and have to redraw the whole thing.
Using this motif once or twice may make a game a little more challenging, but South American Trek uses it extensively. Not only is the technique totally unsuitable for the beginning audience that the game is aimed at, but it is used to such excess that even the advanced gamer will be annoyed more than challenged. The beginner will never want to play another text adventure again.
The information about South America is presented in the " room" descriptions, and in one or two speeches made by Miss Diddlemeyer, an American teacher you may pick up along the way, but who is not necessary to win the game. The presentation is hardly more interesting than just reading it out of a book, since the game doesn't really make you apply the information anywhere, except in the trivia quiz that the submarine captain gives you at the end. The rather dry information about major exports, highest mountains, and longest rivers, does nothing to bring the area alive, since it is primarily a sidebar to the game rather than being integrated into it.
There are one or two laudable points. The game's contrived and unintentionally humourous plot may give the game a small amount of cult value, and the idea of mixing education with play value is a good one, despite the poor execution seen here.
Unfortunately the kids will be too busy trying to redraw their maps and play " guess-the-word" to have time to learn anything, much less have any fun. Gaming parents would be much better advised to try Carmen Sandiego.