The Oregon Trail: 3rd Edition

I grew up playing through various installments in The Oregon Trail series, and remember them with some fondness. So when I unearthed The Oregon Trail: 3rd Edition’s 3-disc CD-ROM box at my parents house, I had to bring it home and see if I could get it working. And surprisingly, I did get it to run successfully after only a few tweaks of the compatibility settings. It comically runs at 640x480 on my 1440p display, but it works which isn’t bad for a 25 year old game.

The Oregon Trail: 3rd Edition (1997)

Completed

The premise of the game is to form a wagon party with some number of strangers, buy supplies, then head west on the Oregon Trail. It’s a long journey through a handful of settlements where you can trade with other people or resupply at a store. You can fish, hunt, or forage for edible plants. And of course there will be countless random events along the way.

The major innovation this installment brought to the series was 3D environments you could explore, and full-motion video clips of characters in the world. You could only point-and-click around what I believe are pre-rendered images, but being able to turn around in a hotel lobby to talk to different potential party members was a new trick. Clicking on a person triggers a recorded video clip; each person might have one thing to say, or a handful if you kept clicking on them. This was so demanding that the first CD is only used for the starting city, where most of the 3D environments and characters appear.

Unfortunately, it appears they put most of the budget into the visuals and not into basic game-play design. Here are some of the most outrageous complaints I have:

• There are 3 main factors on the trail: health, rations, and speed. If you underfeed people or set a grueling pace, health will suffer. This is especially important if someone is already sick. But you can’t see all three factors at the same time.
• Previous games in the series tracked the amount of food you carried in pounds. This game has a full itemized inventory, so you can decide how many biscuit tins you want and whether or not you want butter. This is great for role-playing, but not so great for game play. Do you need butter or will your wagon party eat biscuits dry? How many tins of biscuits do I actually need? Or can you just buy 25 lb. bags of rice and nothing else? Does a balanced diet improve health? I have no idea…
• Similarly, in previous games you could estimate how fast your food was being eaten and replenish accordingly. In this game, there’s a nicely 3D-looking view into a wagon where you can click on various categories and see your inventory. Looks nice, but useless for estimating how much food is being eaten a day.
• There are a lot of other supplies which may or may not be useful. I’m pretty sure extra wagon wheels will help if you break a wheel, but do you ever need a hammer? Or extra clothes? Does health go down if they have to wear the same clothes every day? Who knows?
• There’s no way to see the entire route at once. Instead the route is broken into 4-5 smaller maps, and a red line traces your route while you’re moving. It does tell you how many miles you’ve traveled---but not how many you have left.
• In the end of game scoring, I was informed that my wagon was “loaded-down” with excessive supplies. There’s no weight indicator anywhere, how should I have known that? Is that why my journey took so long?

Basically, the game play loop is watching a random looped video clip (e.g. a wagon wheel rolling through mud, a wolf howling in a field) on the screen while the red line moves along the map on another part of the screen. Every now and then a random event will occur, with several choices which may or may not make a difference. I slogged through to the end and got a low score due to excessive death in my party, poor health, low cash, and a long journey. At least we had high morale, so that’s something.

The main issue is that there’s little to no feedback about how you are doing, so all you can do is react to events as they pop up. Which might have been interesting in 1997 but doesn’t really hold up today, even as an edutainment game.

Not recommended.