Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And this thing right here is The Oregon
Trail, or rather a new iteration of it for 2018. And it's being sold at a suggested
price of $25 US dollars. This is a dedicated electronic handheld unit based
on the classic edutainment game that was made most famous on the Apple II in the
mid-1980s However as fondly remembered as that version is that is not exactly
what you're getting here. In fact what you get is a little bit more advanced
than I expected, more on that in a moment. But yeah for now just look at this thing, man!
I'm always fascinated by dedicated handhelds,
I loved getting those Tiger electronics things back in the day even though they
pretty much all sucked. But this is thankfully a lot better than that. But
somewhat annoyingly it is exclusive to Target stores in the USA, at least as I'm
recording this video. And no this is not sponsored, they didn't send it to me or
anything, I didn't get it for free. I just saw it on the shelf and bought it
because it looked cool. It turns out Target is no stranger to selling
exclusive Oregon Trail products, they also released this Oregon Trail card
game a year or two ago by Pressman. Similar packaging but it's just a card
game. I'm not huge into card games but I picked it up anyway because I like
Oregon Trail products. Anyway this electronic version is manufactured by
Basic Fun which is a division of The Bridge Direct. I've never owned anything
of theirs but I have seen some of them hanging around various shops. Especially
these miniature arcade machines, those were kind of impressive I thought. But yeah this is the
first one of their thingies that I have picked up and you know what? I'm just
ready to get inside of this thing because I mean just look! "Set out on the
trek from Independence, Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley!" Ah, many fond
memories of playing Oregon Trail games over the years, so let's jump into the
box and see what you get inside. Yeah there's little twisty things, just
twist off of there and now there you go. You got one of those little pull tabs to
get the included batteries doing their thing and to get the store demo mode
disabled. And say hello to The Oregon Trail unit itself! A rather compact
little thing about the size of a Game Boy Color, definitely a good bit thicker
than that though. And to me it actually looks a
a little bit like a Macintosh, like an earlier compact Mac. Anyway down here you
have some controls which are, well... they don't feel great let's put it that way.
Cheap, gummy, plasticky things with a rather bizarre d-pad here. You have these
diagonals and cardinal directions then these other keys for enter, the wagon
for the menu, got the sound on and off and a yes or no button for different
questions in game. And you also get a little black and white fold out
instruction manual which pretty much just tells you to play the game. But if
you've played practically any Oregon Trail iteration over the past
30-something years then you'll be right at home because this really is a classic
iteration that has been redone to fit in this handheld form. Press the power
button and it powers on and yep, you get a backlit two-and-a-half inch LCD screen.
It's quite sharp, very readable. This is what I was impressed with, I was
not expecting this to look this "nice," relatively speaking. Yeah, sorry about the
dust and like, scratches. A lot of that is underneath the plastic when I got it.
I tried to clean it up as much as I could but you know. Anyway here you go, this is
The Oregon Trail! And it is the classic game, really. I've covered this
before on LGR many years ago, but the gist of the gameplay is you're a person,
or a family really or group of people, that are trying to get from the east coast to
the west coast of the United States in the mid-1800s. And there are different
difficulty levels depending on who you choose to be from the start. So the
banker has the most money and the carpenter is kind of in the middle and
the farmer's like "nyeh." You can name your leader and four members of your party
which is always an opportunity to have some fun with the naming. And before
setting off on your trek you have to buy some equipment and supplies. And you'll
need to buy, at minimum, some oxen to pull you along. And then you have the option
to get as much food, clothing, ammunition, and spare parts as you want and/or need.
And there you go, you're ready to start! "Good luck! You have a long and difficult
journey ahead of you."
*chiptune Yankee Doodle plays*
So yeah you not only get a full-color screen but a pretty decent little sound
chip that plays chip tunes and PCM sounds! It doesn't have a headphone out
jack so I couldn't get a direct recording but yeah, it sounds pretty
darned acceptable for this tiny little thing. This is a conversion of sorts
of one of the classic versions of the game, and if I had to guess it seems to be
based on the 1989/1990 MS-DOS version of the game, at least judging by these
graphics. It's not identical obviously, they've modified it a bit to be on this
tiny little screen. But it's definitely not the Apple II version, I mean, compared
to that it just doesn't look anything like it. I'm assuming though that they just
made their own version for this specific type of hardware because it's not a
direct emulation of any version of the game that I've ever played or seen. It's
just kind of a mishmash of a few different things. Anyway at this point it
really is just The Oregon Trail: you're going around trying not to die,
attempting to ford rivers and failing spectacularly, and running into all kinds
of problems like heat and broken arms and of course cholera and the infamous
dysentery. And every so often you get a nice little screen with some nice little
music that plays and lets you know where you are on your trek across the United States.
*nice little chiptune plays*
And as gummy, and imprecise, kind of clunky feeling as that
directional pad is for up, down, left, and right, it's fine for the menus. I never
had any problem navigating and pressing enter. It's, again, a bit gummy but it's fine.
This is not like a quick reaction type of game, you're really just navigating
menus for the most part. And for that it is perfectly adequate. However one of the
key parts of The Oregon Trail is the hunting minigame and this is a bit of a
different story as far as controls go. You still have your cardinal directions
but you also have to use those diagonal keys that are around the directional
diamond. It made hunting way more difficult than it needed to be and the
animals move just as fast as they would on other versions of the game from what
I could tell, so they didn't seem to make any concessions for this slightly
awkward control scheme. I was just wasting ammo left and right. Yeah that is
a little disappointing, I don't know why they couldn't have put a little tiny
joystick on there or a more traditional directional pad. Oh well it's completely
playable though and I was able to get through the entire game without dying.
Well I mean, a whole lot of my people died, I think I might have been the only
one left by the end, but hey! I made it and that is all that matters. Look at all
the other people that have played who haven't actually played because I'm the
only one to have played this unit. Unfortunately I didn't run across any
""peperony and chease" on the trail so I guess this is not based on that
particular version that was distributed back in the day. But I didn't expect it
to because as I said I believe this is a custom version that is mixing together
different aspects of different Oregon Trail releases. I don't know about you
but I was kind of curious to get inside of this thing and see what was going on.
Check out these craptastic batteries that it came with it, I do not trust these
at all. They felt like they have the weight of toothpicks, they were just
cheap and pathetic. But hey at least it came with them. So getting the unit open
is thankfully very simple: you just have four Phillips head screws, one in each
corner, and there you go -- it pops right open. And there's not much going on
inside as you might expect for a handheld that costs $24.99. And as
expected this little PCB right here you got this epoxy resin crap that's
covering up the chips. So I don't know exactly what they are and I'm not gonna
try to peel that off there. But if you see the board right there, it's a little
bit of a different layout, but it has the same number as
others that I've seen in certain videos: E156176. The video
I'm specifically thinking of is this one by The 8-bit Guy that he did on the
company's other mini tabletop arcades. The board is very similar, in fact it has
that same number on there and everything, but the layout is a little bit different.
So yeah I guess they're just sort of repurposing these electronics for
whatever they need to over in China, which is pretty darned interesting to me.
I don't know the specifics of it, maybe somebody else can figure out if it is
like a Famicom clone NES on a chip type of thing, I don't know man.
So what you end up with is a standalone version of The Oregon Trail that plays a
lot like what you remember, but is a new thing in a new form factor. And it's just
dedicated Oregon Trail on the go! I like this idea, I don't know about you, and I
have a feeling these are gonna start becoming collectibles. Maybe they already
are, so if you can I recommend picking one of them up if you're interested in a
little handheld Oregon Trail. And I'm also really curious if anybody's gonna
be able to like, hack these things to do something else. I'd be down for a
portable Super Solvers Spellbound, just throwing that out there. Carmen Sandiego
something like that? Yeah man bring on the portable edutainment machines! Anyway,
that is it for this episode of LGR and I hope that you enjoyed checking out this
little thingy. And if you did, well, stick around. I do more videos every Monday and
Friday and occasionally I'll cover something like this that strikes my
fancy even though it's a little bit different than what I normally do. But
that's okay, I hope. And as always thank you very much for watching!