Playing The Oregon Trail II
We got our first computer in 1994. It was a Packard Bell, the ones with the speakers attached to the monitor that sat on top of the PC case. It was that glorious almond milk tan that everything came out in back then. We didn't get internet until 1998 but when we did, we still used that old Packard Bell with its 28.8 modem that screeched awake every time you dialed out.
Back then, without the internet, you played computer games off the CD-ROM or floppy disks that came in the box. One of the few games I had for it was Oregon Trail II, which graciously ran off the onboard graphics processor. I had never played the original game before as our school was a Reader Rabbit and Number Munchers kinda place.
Lately I have been playing it off DOSbox on my ten year old gaming computer. Just like the original game you have to name your party members and set off into the wilds of the American north west.
This game having more horsepower than the first one gives you way more options. You can take various paths and cities to travel to, and even - turn around and go home. Before you head out you have to purchase food, supplies, and medicine. You also have to buy draft animals. The stables have Ox, Mules, and Horses. The horses are extremely expensive, die fast, and can't pull anything so I always go with the oxen.
With this game, and one of the fun extras in it, you have to cross rivers. Each river has a different speed and depth. You get the option to ford the river, float the wagon, and sometimes take a ferry or bridge. Choosing incorrectly will cause the wagon to tip over and you'll lose supplies. When the rivers are frozen over there is a chance to fall through the ice as well.
You can hunt in this one just like the other games. Eventually you might run out of meat and you get the option to hunt at any point while travelling. You also can run out of vegetables and fruit which the party complains about. Also make sure to buy canteens and water jugs from the starting city or else you can run out of water in the arid areas.
There is a map to show you where you are at, but not where you were intending to go so if you go to the wrong city you get deducted points at the end. Each area has different issues to run into at certain times of the year. Don't try to set off during winter or else folks will freeze to death 2 miles outside of town in the snow drifts. Don't leave in the middle of summer or you'll hit the bad water areas and lose party members.
Some stuff you'll run into along the way are dust storms, thunderstorms, stampedes (which always caused my old pc to crash), and extreme heat and cold that will cause the wagons to have to stop and wait. Waiting causes your members to sit and just eat all the food in 3 days.
They eat so much food. You can change the rations but they will burn right through 50lbs of bacon. Not giving them fresh veggies, meat, and fruit can cause them to get sick easier. You can catch all kinds of stuff like cholera, typhus, typhoid, scarlet fever, and various broken bones and random fevers. When hunting you can accidentally get shot.
You can and will lose party members very quickly. There is a random chance to get sick or bit by a snake. Not having enough rest, food, etc increases the chance of something bad happening. Luckily you can heal yourself from this stuff with various medicines from trading posts and trading with other people you meet along the trail.
Trading is the failsafe here. Your wagon wheels will break, you will run out of food, you will need cash for a ferry and you can get them all from trading. It will cost you something crazy too, sometimes they want entire oxen for a box of bullets but other times they'll hand over a wagon wheel for a box of crackers. For some reason the boxes of crackers are like gold in this game to other traders.
It's a little weak on the ending though. You made all this effort to keep people alive and it just ends. After this screen it will show a deed of land ownership and start back at the title screen. The meat of the game is in the travelling and desperate attempt to survive.
I love this game because it brings me back to middle school. Even back then the graphics were a little dated but my computer could run it unlike other stuff at the time. Give it a shot, MECC did their best to make it historically accurate and fun to replay. The music is straight out of a Ken Burns documentary.
Some gracious soul has put the soundtrack to the game on soundcloud if you'd like to hear the country-fresh MIDI beats of westward expansion: