Kicking off Edutainment Month 2018 is one that I've been looking to cover for
many years now. And thanks to a generous donation from an LGR viewer named Bryce
it's finally time to talk about Museum Madness: developed by Novotrade
International and published by MECC in 1994 for MS-DOS and the Macintosh.
And yes that is the same Novotrade responsible for creating Ecco the
Dolphin for the Sega Genesis, as well as a whole slew of edutainment games for
various companies. Like Richard Scarry's How Things Work in Busytown, Paintbox
Pals Around the World in 80 Days, and Magic School Bus
Space Exploration Game just to name a few. But Museum Madness seems to be
Novotrade's most memorable educational title, at least if my inbox of frequent
requests over the years is any indication. "Solve a mystery, overcome
chaos, save the day!" Sounds like a solid educationally entertaining time in my
book. And I'm incredibly curious to finally see for myself since I
unfortunately never got to play this as a youngin'. I have a feeling I would have
very much been into it though if only because on this MS-DOS version it came
on a whopping six high-density 3.5 inch floppy disks. There was also a CD release
later on but forcefully fondling fresh floppies feels fiendishly fantastic, frankly.
You also get a black-and-white instruction manual that doles out
dollops of delectable -- dang it I need to stop with the alliteration.
Yeah the manual. It's probably good to read if you want to know how to install
and play the game and stuff. Museum Madness begins with a MECC logo and a
title screen followed by several more screens of colorful vga artwork and
tastefully funky AdLib music.
*funky yet tasteful FM synth tunes play*
After this you're promptly thrust into the story, being introduced to our
protagonist, a boy named... huh. I just realized he doesn't have a name.
He looks like a Steven though. Stevie. Steve. Whatever he's got a hat and a bit
of an attitude because it's 1994. And he's talking to himself a lot about a
problem accessing the National Museum Interactive System Service. Just then you
get a message from the Museum Interactive Computer Kiosk, or MICK, who
secretly happens to be a fully sapient robot. Seriously, that fact is just
casually tossed in there among the other bits of lore. Apparently it's no big deal
though because the real groundbreaking information here is that the museum's
computer system has a virus, oh no. You're the only person for the job and must
sneak into the museum and break in. Yeah even Steve here is befuddled at the
request, legitimately asking how this situation makes any sense. But in the end
he accepts his fate because that's just what Steves do. Once you reasonably wait
until morning, you reach the museum and the first order of business is to find a
way inside. Because of course the robot with human intelligence that hacked your
computer and told you to come here in the first place won't actually open the
dang door. Nope, you just go around to the side entrance and type in the passcode
which clearly and conveniently is displayed directly outside of the museum
above the front door in the proper order and everything. Oh well, still more secure
than Facebook's user data. Once you're inside you're provided with--ugh what is this,
a maze? Yep, it's a maze. Complete with multiple
locked doors, key cards, and dead ends. Nrngguh and it's one of those ridiculously
confusing mazes where navigation and visual perspective is entirely based on
the character's most recent movements. So if you go north then go south, what was
once north is now south and vice versa. Same with all the cardinal directions.
This also means that some pathways can't be seen unless you approach them from
the opposite direction of where you came from. Not only that but half the screens
are indistinguishable from the others, making it just that little bit
more frustrating. Fantastic. What's the point of this exactly? Especially since
you can just skip this entire introductory sequence by pressing the
escape key. For real, just press escape and you're instantly inside the
museum, leading me to think the developers knew it was pointless but
didn't want to take it out for whatever reason. Whatever man, at this point you're
greeted by MICK, the totally nothing-special robot with human intelligence
that isn't a big deal. His batteries are running out so that's not good. And this
gives you a nice opportunity to test out the game's interactions and inventory.
It works just like a point-and-click graphic adventure because that's pretty
much what it is. The solution to this puzzle is to open up a museum tour tape
deck with your pocket knife, remove the batteries, and provide them to MICK. So yeah,
pointing, clicking, adventuring. Graphically. You get the idea. MICK then
lets you in on the details which is that in the middle of the night all of the
museum's animatronics and computerized exhibits have been taken over by a
malicious program of some kind. So you need to go and repair each of the 25
exhibits before it turns into Five Nights at MICK's and then Shawn Levy
decides to make a movie about it starring Ben Stiller. Yeah the idea of
inanimate objects coming alive at night is a pretty common trope, but props to
Museum Madness for at least doing something a bit unique here. That being
to use museum exhibits gone berserk as an opportunity to teach science and
history by way of returning each part of the museum to its original state. You get
five categories with five exhibits each, broadly covering the topics of
technology, space exploration, American history, earth science, and world history,
sort of -- that last one is kind of a free-for-all. The order in which you
proceed is up to you, but really the overall goal is the same no matter what.
You just visit every exhibit and complete the challenges within. Each of
these are self-contained in terms of puzzle types and gameplay mechanics, so
there's always a bit of experimentation to find out exactly what the game wants
you to do. For example this room has you reconstructing a Rube Goldberg machine.
You'll know you've done it correctly when the machine works, but finding out
precisely where it wants you to snap each object into place can be finicky,
even if you mentally know what it should look like. Still fun to watch it come
together when you do figure out where it wants you to put all the parts though.
Same goes for this series of puzzles surrounding the Wright brothers' attempts
to fly. You may know mentally what an airfoil looks like, or you might be able
to guess based on the feather on the wall. But even if you do it can be hard
to tell what the game actually wants you to come up with in the context of this
puzzle and its particular shapes and graphics. Not only that but it's frequently vague
in how to accomplish these puzzles. Like here where it just expects you to pick
up a wrench in a previous room and use it to open these windows to create a
wind tunnel. That's just one of dozens of examples in Museum Madness being a tad
obscure in its intentions for the player in each room. Like yeah I know that the
people involved in the Salem witch trials were falsely accusing people of
being witches. But how do I prove that? Well in this case it can only be done by
moving this vase to higher ground and poking a hole in the window shutters to
make the light reflect a rainbow on the ceiling. Well dang, who knew that
historical tragedy could have been avoided so easily? And then other times
the solution to repairing an exhibit is so simple it's arguably just a waste of
time. I'm really not sure what you're supposed to be learning by putting this
torn up drawing back together again but it has you doing this kind of thing
multiple times. Or like what are you supposed to learn from rigging a
jousting tournament by consulting a wizard about changing the background
color of a knight's coat of arms? Seriously that's how you solve this. You
just obey the wizard's crystal ball to change the coat of arms and that ensures
victory over the king's knight.
Yeah along the way it's letting you know things like heraldry and squires
existed but that's about it. Oh well, I don't want to be too harsh on
this because you do get more, it's just inconsistent. Some of these sections
involving subjects like computer logic or thrust in the vacuum of space
involved some legit logical challenge.
These were tricky! Anyone was doing
something trivial and/or tedious, like say plopping animal silhouettes onto a
cart in order to repopulate nature dioramas four creatures at a time, you're
still getting plenty of artwork and music that were pretty awesome in 1994.
Or at least I would have been impressed back then as an eight-year-old. I can
totally see why Museum Madness brings back such fond memories for those that
played it as a kid. And even now as a technical adult I'm still intrinsically
drawn to these environments and the general atmosphere of this maddening
museum, if only for undefinable and nostalgic reasons. I don't know man,
there's a part of my brain that always explodes with excitement when presented
with 256-color graphics and FM synth music.
Charming is all that is though,
I've got to say the ending is laughably dumb. I mean look at this, you defeat the
virus and it's like "oh hey, you win. Everything's good now, all in a day's work."
BAM! It goes black and you're back to the DOS prompt. No ending scene
showing a happy museum, no credits sequence, no robot make-out scenes,
nothing but DOS. Dang. Yeah well that's Museum Madness for ya.
Filled with equal parts mid-90s edutainment goodness and mid-90s game
design weirdness. And it is all kinds of amusing as a result.
Well here we are it's another edutainment month. Time flies, I don't
understand, but that's what it is. So throughout the month of April there
are more edutainment videos coming every Friday, and other stuff on Mondays.
So stay tuned if you like this kind of thing.
And as always thank you very much for watching!