The Oregon Trail 3rd Edition

"Look at what my party members are dying from: Influenza, Mountain Fever, Bear Mauling. Well, OK, bear mauling might count as an acceptable reason . ."

Howdy, partner. Are you ready for yet another incarnation in a game that has been around for decades, and has only changed by improving the graphics and adding a few extras? Are you ready to relive the horrors of pioneer life while sitting in air-conditioned comfort, drinking Dr. Pepper? Are you ready to die from getting a common cold? These are the questions you must dare ask yourself before putting in that first disc of The Oregon Trail: Third Edition.

You’ll be taking out that disc pretty quickly; Not because the game is bad, but because the first disc only houses the town of Independence, and its various locals, shops, and all of the necessary menus for starting up your voyage. And it’s easy to get lost in Independence. The town view perspective leaves much to be desired, and you can easily get lost trying to navigate around town. It’s best to head to the hotel, make your party, and get the hell out of town, and then return from the trail menu, which puts you right outside the supply store.

Making your party is the first key thing in Oregon Trail 3. First, you have to choose a profession for yourself that provides plenty of money along the way. (Bankers give the most, but lawyers and doctors are not far behind.) After that, pick some companions that will be useful along the way. Carpenters and blacksmiths are better at repair work, nurses are good for health. Journalists are good for nothing. Plan accordingly. Then leave that hotel as soon as you can, because it’s the last posh accommodations you will see until you hit Oregon, and you do not want to get used to them.

After filling out your ranks, it’s a good idea to somehow navigate the maze-like town of Independence and get to the store. Think of this general store as a modern day Target or K-Mart. You can buy everything from medicine to live chickens, grandfather clocks to decks of playing cards. Try and buy now what’s useful along the journey. At the end you can get some stuff to raise your score, but you want the load to be as light as you can get it along the way.

The load has to be light, because as you ride through the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, the Rockies of Colorado and Wyoming, and deal with the extreme cold of Idaho and Oregon you will have your oxen just begging you to stop. Besides, there’s no use in you stocking up on food in Independence anyway, because you can get plenty of your own as your journey progresses.

Hunting and gathering is an integral part of keeping your crew alive along the journey. Gathering is a simple process of identification -- a member of your party gathers four plants, which you proceed to look up and identify, to learn if they’re edible. Hunting is essentially a really watered-down version of DeerHunter. You’ve got twenty shots on each trip out, and you can select a gun from a short list of whatever you’ve purchased along the way. Then, take your pick of the available animals. You also need to keep in mind that you can only keep some of the meat you kill -- 375 pounds is the standard threshold for a full party. Also, make sure to keep buying gunpowder and bullets along the way. And, well, fishing’s just dumb luck and a waste of time.

When playing Oregon Trail: Third Edition, you’ll be wanting to kill some time along the way. In between famed landmarks such as Fort Kearney and Chimney Rock, you’ll face miles of nothingness, thankfully represented by nothing but regions on a map. The diversions of getting food tend to get boring after a while, so at times you just want to rush through your journey. In a futile attempt to get you to slow down and experience the game a bit, the ability to trade was included. At each outpost or destination, there will be someone there to trade with. Most often any deal you make is a complete rip-off and not worth your time -- it’s usually better to just walk into the store at the same site and buy the item. Worse still, some of these traders are actually robbers who will steal your wares. The Learning Company needs to put some more work into their trading engine if they ever want it to get off the ground.

Yes, even with little things to do along the way, the journey is a long hard one. When conditions become fierce, you -- as the leader of the wagon train -- need to decide what’s best for the group as a whole, be it to churn forward or circle the wagons and wait until the conditions improve. Keep in mind that people live and die by your consequences, and if you reach Oregon with three out of your five characters alive, you’re doing well. You can also -- at a few places along the route -- choose alternate paths. Each path tends to meet up with the other quite soon down the road, making your choice almost useless. In fact, the only option with any real bearing on the outcome of the game involves when you select Astoria or Oregon City as the location for your final homestead. Keep in mind that final score is based off of how well you performed on your journey, and that will have a great impact on the land grant you receive.

Control is simple along the way, all done with mouse control. Menus are simple to navigate, and the purchase and barter system has no real flaws. The biggest flaw with the control involves how damn difficult it is to find your way around Independence. Other than that, the interfaces are all easily laid out for young children, aiming while hunting is just a matter of knowing to shoot the deer in the heart and not the head, and river floatation just requires reflexes. Nothing major.

The Oregon Trail: Third Edition is quite possibly too difficult for the target audience. I know the package says it’s for older players too, but we all know that the core Oregon Trail audience is between the ages of eight and ten. Oregon Trail 3 has far more hazards along the way to deal with than previous incarnations, and the sheer amount of work one has to do to have a successful journey can be overwhelming to the younger set. Even when having played the game on multiple occasions, getting your entire party safely to the Oregon Territory is a nearly impossible task.

Partially for the degree of difficulty, causing you to feel as if the weight of the world is on your shoulders, and partially because of the western, folksy theme of resettling to an untamed land, The Oregon Trail: Third Edition just screams for you to fire up some Bob Dylan. You know, to play Tombstone Blues every time that a party member succumbs to the inevitable and departs from our own dispassionate existence. Me being a Minnesota boy, I’m trying not to be biased, but having Bobby playing in the background makes the game ever so much more atmospheric.

I think The Learning Company needed a little push for Bob Dylan, because the graphics along the trail aren’t anything to head across the country for. Characters in the game have been rendered in painstaking detail, but the age of the game shows in how slow those characters move. At times, it almost has the Night Trap look of actors portraying the characters and then being outlaid onto the game screens.

The building fronts are painted so that they look like they’re straight from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman -- it’s almost like they ripped off the entire series set from CBS. Seriously, all we need is Jane Seymour running around in Fort Walla Walla playing doctor, and the series is nailed. There’s even a guy that looks vaguely like the unkempt Sully. Granted, he’s a two-timing, back stabbing thief, but he’s still there.

Anyway, in case you are lucky and haven’t been subjected to the horror of watching a western drama that doesn’t focus on gunplay and bad acting in saloons, I’ll fill you in more on the town descriptions. Buildings have false fronts, and store keepers tried to have some degree of uniformity while still attempting to stand out and make them seem better then the competing merchants. Flamboyance is masked by an aura of semblance, which results in a lot of earthy-toned buildings with ornate wood carvings on the facades to exude the feeling of wealth and power. In other words, it’s like Hollywood, but without the flash and set in the 1870s. The sound effects also lack the movie magic that you’d hope they would contain, and they offer up some rather plain noises, including some remakes of sounds that have been around since the original. Why the hell should they develop something new when they can recycle? Yes, laziness complexes abound in the world today.

On occasions barring hunting excursions and visits to towns or landmarks, views of the milieus that form the essence of the untamed wild west are limited to a brown-and-white map, appropriately designed with the misconceptions of the late 1800s in mind. While this keeps the flow of the game moving at a rapid pace -- so the young’uns don’t get bored -- you lose a sense of being there, the feeling that you are one with the journey, the desire to live so long you’d head right up into Donner Pass and devour your family members and imbibe their blood like the infamous namesakes once did. The emotions of the trek are somehow lost in the translation.

Oregon Trail 3 is a game that entertains for a while, but becomes monotonous and repetitive with amazing speed. The more you become accustomed to each nuance of the voyage, the more each pop-up message annoys you, frustrates you, and makes you wish that the game would just hurry the hell up. However, when you’ve been away for it for a while you feel the compelling desire to play through it again, just to see if your abilities to micromanage nuances of poor traveler’s lives have become greater in the time away.

The Oregon Trail: Third Edition is an aberration from where the series appeared to be headed after the second installment. Much of the depth of numero dos has been sacrificed for speed (yes, despite moving at a snail’s pace, it is faster) and a desire for more casual players to experience it. As series black sheep go Oregon Trail 3 runs in the middle of an uninspired pack.

PROS
*Primitive hunting engine included.
*New barter and trade interface.
*Plays great with Bob Dylan in the background.

CONS
*Bob Dylan music must be purchased separately.
*HURRY UP YOU STUPID GAME!
*One town takes up an entire disc? Give me a break.

SCORE SUMMARY

GAMEPLAY--7
GRAPHICS--5
MUSIC--1
SOUND--4
CONTROL--7
FUN--6
CHALLENGE--MEDIUM TO HIGH
REPLAY VALUE--MEDIUM

OVERALL--5

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/21/02, Updated 08/21/02