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It's April once again
and here on LGR, that means Edutainment Month,
where we'll be taking a look at an edutainment game each weekend.
And what's more educationally entertaining than Encarta Encyclopedia?
Okay, to be fair, I can think of at least a few dozen things,
but whatever, we're looking at Encarta, so you can get over it.
In case you're not familiar,
Encarta was a multimedia encyclopedia software
published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009.
Before the days of the Internet being filled with links to Wikipedia
and horny singles in your area,
you more often than not had to buy an encyclopedia
in order to research stuff.
By the time the '90s rolled around,
these had moved on from being books
to coming on fancy-shmancy CD-ROMs.
And alongside other CD encyclopedias like Compton's and Grolier's,
Encarta was a choice gateway drug to research and reference on the PC.
This is the deluxe 1998 edition of Encarta we're looking at here,
but they all worked more or less the same.
The meat of the experience is the articles,
just like in traditional encyclopedias from World Book or Britannica.
But in a multimedia variant like Encarta,
you had all sorts of extra stuff to enjoy as well
which made the experience far more tolerable
as an easily distracted, hyperactive youngster.
Pictures, video clips, animations,
360-degree panoramas,
maps,
links to the World Wide Web.
Holy crap, this was paradise.
At least it was when you just wanted to be on the computer,
but your parents were tired of you playing Duke Nukem all the time,
so saying you were doing educational things was a perfect excuse.
And that's where Encarta freaking shined,
because it went beyond just being a virtual book
to being a wonderland of computerized learning.
Some of these so-called "interactivities" were a godsend
to youngins stuck in computer classes, study halls,
or even just at home having to do homework.
Like this one here where you put dinosaur skeletons back together.
Or this one where you could make a moon crash into a planet
and watch it explode, complete with crunchy sound effects.
[explosion]
But probably the most remembered activity is a game called Mind Maze,
included on versions of Encarta from 1995 to 2007.
You could access it from one of the main menus of earlier versions,
or pressing Ctrl-Z on later ones,
but either way this was a welcome passport to boredom relief.
It starts off with a short little story
telling you about how there's this castle owned by King Miser I,
and things were pretty uneventful until the place was cursed,
resulting in a tear in the space-time continuum,
as is prone to happen in medieval castles.
Apparently, just reading about it causes you to get sucked into this world,
and you're left standing in front of the castle gate,
looking like Calvin Fuller with a computer mouse.
Enter your name, then click the castle door
to enter through the door of the castle with a click.
You can then choose from nine trivia subjects
with a tenth one combining them all together
and four difficulty levels.
Click again to enter the starting hallway
and finally, click a door to enter the first room.
The goal of the game is to make it out of the castle
by wandering through a maze of rooms
and answering a piece of trivia in each of them.
Answer enough and you'll not only escape the castle and free its cursed inhabitants,
but you'll also be declared next in line to be king.
unless you want to snub them and be a dick about it and just go back home.
Although each room looks a little different
due to the randomized nature of the game,
what you do in each of them is exactly the same.
There will be a person or creature to click on
that'll tell you something about the castle or the curse,
and hopefully a door or two letting you move on to the next room.
As you methodically meander your way through the maze,
you'll notice that the map in the bottom-left fills itself in.
This is handy because mazes suck.
You'll also have five torches to light in each maze,
which flashes the complete map for a moment,
so you know where to go next,
effectively removing all walls so you can see the entire surrounding region.
That is one absurdly powerful torch.
Can you imagine them actually working like that in real life?
Make it through the maze, and you'll find a spiral staircase
leading to the next maze,
which is filled with more or less the same people, rooms and questions,
except in a randomized order and layout.
To beat the game, you need to collect 20,000 points
and that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours,
depending on the difficulty level chosen.
The amount of points you get is determined by how hard the questions are,
as well as how quickly you can answer a question,
since you lose points every second.
Although, you CAN just look up the answers to each question,
since, you know, this is a freaking encyclopedia.
In fact, all you have to do is click the little book beside each possible answer
to see if it's the right one.
Of course, this takes time, so chances are you'll just want to wing it.
And you have two chances at each question,
so you effectively have a 50-50 chance of answering correctly anyway.
On top of that, there are a limited number of questions you'll be asked,
and chances are you'll see the same question
ten times during a single playthrough,
sometimes even back-to-back.
And yes, as you might imagine,
the game ends up being a bit repetitive before long.
Same questions. Same music. Same people. Same rooms.
Same staircase at the end of every maze, and you can't even die.
I'm starting to feel a bit like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day."
And I'm starting to feel a bit like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day."
At least you have a bit of a reprieve with the characters
spouting their absurdities regarding the castle,
the other people and the curse itself.
Polly the Parrot is particularly fun
as the guy is super resentful of his owner
and has a real snarky attitude about everything going on.
Well, these characters are a reprieve
until THEY start repeating themselves, too.
But still, super-engaging and constantly fresh gameplay
was not the appeal of Mind Maze.
The appeal was that this was a game in freaking Encarta Encyclopedia,
and you could play it while you were supposed to be looking stuff up.
It also provided something gamey for us kids
that didn't have many games to choose from
so it was just an event when you discovered it.
Not only that, but there was just something imaginative and alluring
about the aesthetic of this castle.
Something about the way the staircase looked
and the way these rooms were laid out.
It was just kind of weird and surreal
and really got my imagination going.
Mind Maze is remembered very fondly any time it's brought up,
and I totally see why because I remember it fondly myself.
Yeah, the game would be seriously lacking if it were released on its own,
but the fact of the matter was that it was a cool little extra with an encyclopedia.
They didn't NEED to do this, but they did it anyway,
and I have to thank the developers for that.
So I salute you, Microsoft devs in the mid-'90s.
You made a lot of childhoods less boring
and made learning random trivia more fun,
if even for a short amount of time.
And that right there is what edutainment is all about, if you ask me.
[regal MIDI music]
If you enjoyed this first episode of Edutainment Month 2014,
why not take a look at some of the others that I've done.
There's more edutainment coming up this month as well,
and I do videos every week, so subscribing – that's a thing.
And you can also check me out on Twitter, Facebook, Patreon,
and your nearest tear in the space-time continuum.
And as always, thank you for watching.