Hi kids! As a special treat for our Wild West Week, I went back to my parents’ house and searched an old box of my stuff. Under some empty Surge bottles and my Darth Maul lightsaber, I found it: the first video game review I ever wrote! Here it is, all typed up. I edited out some of my nine-year old misspellings for the sake of clarity and because I was only willing to go so far with this conceit.

Dustin S.

Mrs. Dorough’s Class

April 1, 1991

So when gym class got out today I ran to computer class as fast as I could. I had to, on account of the class only has three copies of Oregon Trail on floppy disk, and I don’t wanna get stuck with Number Crunchers or Math Blasters.

Oregon Trail is the best computer game ever! I can only play it at school because my dad says we have a “DOS” computer at home and this game is only for “Apple” computers. I told him to get an Apple computer but he says Apple will be out of business in a year. I’ve never liked a computer game more — except my cousin Ricky says that in middle school they have a “CD Rom” called Encarta that has some naked pictures in it, so maybe that’s better.  Oh, and he also has something called a “web browser” that has some neat stuff on it, but I don’t really understand what that is.

Anyway, Oregon Trail is good because you get to shoot stuff and sometimes your friends die of dysentery. Here’s what happened in class today:

I popped in the disk and waited for the computer to boot up. I picked my job (banker, duh… why would I pick another job with less money?) and had to pick names for my party members. So I picked the coolest people alive today.

That’s right, it’s me, Rufio from Hook, Wayne from Wayne’s World, Captain Planet, and Kurt Cobain. This trip is gonna be gnarly.

I bought everything I needed, like clothes and spare parts and enough bullets to kill every living thing in the Wild West. I’m gonna be all like the Terminator, mowing down everything in my path! The good Terminator from T2, not the evil one (God I hope they keep making those movies for the next twenty years).

I didn’t buy food, though. If God wanted me to buy food he wouldn’t have put slow-moving pixelated buffalo all over America. Speaking of which, I stopped off immediately to add some animals to the endangered species list.

Man, shooting stuff is totally tubular. I wish somebody made a game where all you did is shoot stuff. I would totally buy that game. I just hope it’s not on Super Nintendo because Dad says we can’t afford one, not with gas being over a dollar a gallon these days.

I hit the trail and turned down my people’s rations. There are only so many rabbits I can shoot.

Then came the boring part: watching my cart roll slowly to the left until the next class bell rings. I just hope my whole party makes it.

Kurt has a fever. The only prescription is flannel and rock n’ roll! Seriously, though, if Kurt dies I’ll totally freak out.

Not again! First Captain Hook  killed him, now it’s typhoid. My innocence is broken again.

Party over, Wayne.

I don’t know why Captain Planet didn’t just fly over the river. I’m not sure I know what irony is, but I guess an elemental god drowning in four feet of water probably qualifies. From now on, it’ll be “Earth! Fire! Wind! Heart! Water sucks! Go Planet!”

I had to flip the floppy disk over. God, that’s annoying. I hope someone invents a kind of disk that you don’t have to change out mid-game.

Kurt and I made it! Wow, these graphics are amazing. Games will never look better than this. Now to enter my name in the High Scores list.

God I’m awesome.

Anyway, this is the best game ever. But there’s the bell. Time to go to Science. Then I get to go home and watch Darkwing Duck and eat a Fruit Roll-Up. This is the best day ever!

—–

Things We Liked: It’s better than Number Crunchers. It’s funny when people die. Hunting.

Things We Disliked: The game takes like an hour and computer lab is only forty-five minutes (I hope someday they make a thing where you can stop playing one day and pick up where you left off the next day). Flipping the disk over sucks hard. No power-ups. None of the characters are on Captain N, so it doesn’t really count as a game.

Target Audience: Me, Robert, and Mikey mostly. I think Tina likes it, too, but fuck girls.

(The Oregon Trail – Developer: MECC. Publisher: The Learning Company. Available on Apple II. Unfamiliar with CFD!’s review system? Read our newly revised explanation here.)