"The Oregon Trail" in other countries.

[raeior]

Another infamous example of censoring in games is Half-Life: Killed scientists and civilians don't die. They sit down on the ground and shake their heads in grief.

Oh god yes, also the barnacles would spit out gears, springs and other metal stuff when killed. The enemy soldiers were robots too.

Another example would be "I have no mouth and I must scream". One of the characters was completely cut out because he had been the right hand of Josef Mengele and his personal torture vision was that of a concentration camp. This made one of the endings of the game unobtainable because you needed certain items that you could only get with certain characters.

I was really surprised that Wolfenstein The new order was allowed in Germany. Especially the concentration camp scene..I mean the nazis there are called "Wölfe" (wolves) but...it is obvious what they are.

The problem overall: german politicians obviously are regarding videogames as toys for kids. Violence and display of anticonstitutional symbols in movies and other media is completely fine, but not in games.

The problem is the definition of art in Germany. Films are regarded as art hence they are allowed to show swastikas and the like. Videogames might be regarded art too, the definition is not that..well..defined. The problem is someone would have to fight in court for this. There was a lengthy report about this in a recent Gamestar where I think a guy from Ubisoft? said that basically no publisher would go into court to fight for the right to show swastikas because it's suicide PR wise. Also financially they could fail in court thus losing a lot of money for nothing. As long as no one does this, or the law is changed to explicitly state that video games are art nothing will change.


As to the original question..well errr I think there was Ökolopoly which we used in some class but that's about it. There is also a game called "Aufschwung Ost" which was some kind of...Simcity meets Transport Tycoon in eastern Germany after the reunion but I guess that was probably never used in school (not that I know of anyway).

 

[trollnystan]

Swede here. I remember playing Oregon Trail when I was a kid, but I'm unsure if it was cos my brother had a copy or if it was in school. Probably school; I went to an English speaking class from grade 4-6 and we had all kinds of educational computer games in English. Don't know if there are/were any historical educational games in Swedish though.

 

[Kiardras]

In the UK, at primary school we had these awesome educational games. You started at a dig site (Roman, Viking, Egyptian etc) and had to use spade, trowel and brush to uncover relics. You got information on most of them, and then you'd get unknown ones. This would trigger you going back in time (cause, science I guess) and investigating what it was. It was a 2d skewed isometric, and you would interact with villagers and do simple quests to find out what the relic had been used for.


They were epic games.

 

[Frezzato]

Never played it. Never even heard about it til now.

I've never played the original, but I played a newer, absurd version of it made by a guy in Canada. This newer version is ridiculous and totally worth checking out in my opinion.

Captain Games [http://www.captain-games.com/] - So Long, Oregon [http://solongoregon.captain-games.com/]. It's free on PC, will run on even the crappiest of underpowered machines, and is kind of...loud. Beware of using headphones with this game.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Oregon trail was a good game so the rest of the world got exposed to it outside of schools through word of mouth. Dad got it when I was a kid and we both played the hell out of.

God it was hard to figure out when to start your expedition when you're in Australia and the seasons are flipped around as a kid.

 

[Wendman]

for those of you raised in other countries, did you have something similar? If so, what was it?

Nope.

 

[gamer_parent]

you can always do journey to the west stuff with it, with the whole Monkey King and stuff. Of course, the focus would shift less to just resource management, and a lot more on conflict resolution.

 

[Emcee_N]

I think I had a similar one called Gold Rush or something, based in the Australian outback during the Gold Rush (hence the name).

You mean Goldfields? I had that and loved it, although I remember it being much easier than what I hear of Oregon Trail. I think I wound up being essentially the best at all possible professions.

As for edutainment purposes, no, we never played Oregon Trail. The similar age bracket at schools in Australia pretty generally just played Carmen Sandiego.