[intro music]
[typing]
If you ask me, the most effective edutainment games
are the ones that don't simply entertain kids
but feature a specific set of skills that can be developed by playing.
Like the game we're looking at here--
eh, yeah... oh...
If only I could play the game and learn to read,
so I could let you know what this is called.
But how do I know if I'm holding up the correct disk
if I don't already know how to read?
Ooh...
Good point. I fooled ya, though, didn't I?
Yes, it's Reader Rabbit.
The game that allows rabbits to read.
Or not.
If you don't let them.
But that would just be stunting their education,
and who are you to deny a leporide the joy of the cognitive process
of decoding symbols in order to derive meaning from them?
The game came on a 5¼-inch double-density floppy disk like this,
unless you had one of the other versions,
in which case it didn't.
As you can tell from this awesomely colored intro screen,
Reader Rabbit is from The Learning Company.
And while this version hails from 1989,
it was originally published in the far superior year of 1984
for the Commodore 64 and Apple II.
This is the DOS EGA version that we'll be looking at for the review,
but there was also a CGA version,
which is just fantastic, if you believe that less is more,
or have a prurient fixation on magenta and cyan.
I also love how the game is
already teaching kids valuable stuff,
like the fact that coking up before conducting a train next to a trash can
is probably a bad idea.
Once you get through learning by example
from Reader's astronomical bender,
you're smacked in the face with a menu screen,
providing you four game types to choose from.
The Sorter game,
the Labeler game,
the Word Train game
and the Matchup games.
We'll take a look at these,
starting with number one and moving onward,
since I found that following a logical numerical order helps keep me sane.
The first game on the list is Sorter,
where you must help Reader Rabbit sort the words
into the meaningless slots beneath his presumably lucky feet,
and do so quickly enough,
or else they'll fall into the trash forever.
The idea is to keep the words with the same letter in the same place
as the ones shown at the top of the sorter machine.
It's incredibly simple and even on the highest speed setting
it's not exactly going to challenge most youngsters.
Get five carrots
and you'll win the prize of a stack of pointless three-letter words
and the chance to watch Reader Rabbit do a little dance number,
which is good because I like my hasenpfeffer nice and limber.
The next game is Labeler,
which sounds like the dreariest of Monday morning office jobs,
but is in fact the okayest
of Friday morning game review material.
The idea here is to unscramble the letters to spell the words
to match with the three pictures shown.
Letter choosing goes from left to right
and, once again, the words only consist of three letters each,
so fans of the first Mersenne prime number
are in for one heck of a party.
Yeah...
identify bags, lids, mops, pans,
cups, boxes, and all sorts of other domestic clutter items
like some kind of "The Price is Right" product scout
trying to recover from amnesia.
Once you're successful, you'll get an animation of a little rabbit
tumbling around on top of the graphics,
which lends credence to the idea that they are in fact solid objects
and are not simply a selection of placeholder shapes.
You know, it's possible they may even have feelings,
but that's getting far too complex for my brain,
so let's move on to the Word Train game!
You start out at the word factory,
which apparently has quite the overly-efficient freight route going on,
since the trucks carrying the assembled words
only have to travel, like, twenty feet
to drop them onto the train.
And once you realize that there's actually some logistics guy out there
who has freaked out over this idea at some point since 1986,
you'll want to start making a train of words
that differ by only one letter
from the word on the train engine.
Once you either miss a word or completely fill the train
with precious graphemic cargo,
then the Rabbit train will depart
from the Rabbit train station.
Yup, that's it. No goodbyes, no silly animations.
It's just like, "Uh, I'm a rabbit and I like trains,"
and it leaves you there.
Never to return...
Until it does, at which point you either play again
or go to the final game, the Matchup.
There are six variants of this,
but it's all the same, really.
It's a simple memory matching game with a simple reading twist.
Uncover a card,
try to find its match,
clear the screen,
do it again.
Since the selection of cards is so small for each screen,
there's an almost complete lack of skill required.
But that's cool because it's all about reading and stuff.
Make it slightly more challenging by playing one of the other modes,
which shows words or parts of words instead of pictures.
And yeah, that frigging Reader frigging Rabbit.
The timeless classic that's timeless mostly because it's all about reading
and not telling time.
There are no working timepieces in the game whatsoever.
It teaches younger children to read at a very basic level
and it's cool because it's got a very basic bunch of gameplay to go along with it.
Plus it spawned like a million and a half Reader Rabbit games
that are, oddly enough, not only limited to reading,
even though they're all still called Reader Rabbit.
Really, why would they even consider changing the name for other subjects?
It's a wise choice
because... alliteration, man.
And multiple consecutive R's
result in a ridiculously raucous range of responsible wordplay.
And hey, I mean, rabbits are made of fur and cuteness,
so why not? It's a good choice.
Sure sounds better than Reader Ragfish
or Reader Roundworm, if you ask me.
Heh...
The Reader Raptor?
That sounds pretty fricking amazing but whatever.
Yeah, TLC's Reader Rabbit
for DOS and the Apple II and Macintosh and whatever else.
It's made of good times and nostalgia for those of us that remember it,
and I approve.
[PC speaker music outro]