Fatounuquan

This is another game I played for hours as a kid. For its time, moving around a big map in a vehicle was something new and exciting. Landing and keeping up with assignments as they build up are the two biggest challenges in the game, and the difficulty is good enough for people of varying skill levels. Higher levels get to be quite a challenge as you try to balance completing a gazillion missions that are all ongoing and eating away at your points meter, which is how you advanced to the next level. Having real historical helicopter models adds some depth. Although it's highly compressed to today's standards, the sound track is pretty groovy with some memorable tunes. It gets a bit confusing when you have a helicopter that has more seating slots than are visible on the screen. Also, the people have a kinda weird half sprite, half 3-D style that makes their bodies look disconnected. The graphics are a bit glitchy in terms of loading; sometimes the game will freeze up for a second or two, which is really disconcerting when you're trying to not run into tall buildings. Cool fact: this was the first game where Simlish (the gibberish glossolalia made famous in The Sims series) appeared.

I played this game for many hours as a child, and I returned to play it as an adult. The isometric graphics can't be rotated, but the pixel art still looks fine in its 256 color glory. The sound effects are memorable, even goofy at times (a didgeridoo plays when you scroll around), and when you're new to the game, balancing producer-herbivore-carnivore relationships can be challenging enough to be interesting. The game last under 2 hours if you're judging just based on how long it takes to get to the top ranger level, but gameplay really lasts as long as you have the patience for it. My three complaints are depth of play in terms of complexity, how species identification early in the game breaks up the pacing, (I don't know if this is required to progress through the levels), and, as something relevant to an educational game, some of the ecological details don't make sense: eating berries from a plant shouldn't kill it. I was able to get it to run on Windows 10 with some glitches, such as missing file errors when they were still in the right places (which inhibited the ability to save) and sprite transparency issues for overlaid animations, but gameplay was otherwise normal. Cool fact: the original boxed version of the game included a SimPark watch.