This game was awesome!! Played it at school all the time, Good memories.

mnml10387

... Finally?

These games have NOT gone out of print at all! I keep finding copies of this at places like Wal-Mart and Rite-Aid.

Dave Silva

Ages 6-12.....oh dammit!

KillerScooter

Even better, make them super cheap, or free, on XBLA.

tk.

@Falcon PAUNCH!!!:
Omg Word Muncher... I remember that. o_o Anyone other than me also managed to play Reading Blaster?... No?... nevermind

DustySword

@Rebochan: Totally agree about the new version of Number Munchers. The first one was good, but now they could definitely make a very cool title.

Sensai-N

Bravo! Bravo! As a mathemagician myself, I can say that I, too, seriously applaud this. Unfortunately, I never got to play Math Blaster. (I had to cope instead with Number Munchers.) But anything that can put more mathematics out there in front of children anywhere in the world, I am all for.

I don't think that schools would wholly go for the idea of having consoles as educational systems just because consoles (or any other gaming system, for that matter) will largely have more titles that are not educational. Also, convincing them that the same machine that allows you to play a Grand Theft Auto game can be beneficial for children would be an uphill battle solely because of the bad press associated with such games.

I would say that console vendors have a good incentive if your theory holds where "If you hook a 5-year-old, and more importantly their parents, on the Wii or the PS3 or the 360, then you've got them for life." And it really would be a great way for them to give back to both the gaming and educational communities.

Sensai-N

@Falcon PAUNCH!!!: Oh schnap! Don't get me started on The ClueFinders series! Though I'd never buy an educational game for my consoles, if the games are as fun as ClueFinders and the previously mentioned titles, I couldn't see this as a bad move. Though I can see everyone somehow blaming Nintendo for this. It's sad, really.

Falcon PAUNCH!!!

I demand a new version of Number Munchers!

Rebochan

@RaptureScientist: This series was the reason I used to want a Macintosh computer back in the day.

Falcon PAUNCH!!!

Aww man, this reminds me so much of my elementary school. Word Muncher... Odelle Lake... Carmen Sandiedo.... They were all great! I am curious, however, as to what educational shovelware would be like. Outdated explanations on how to solve a problem?

Falcon PAUNCH!!!

I vaguely remember playing a game like this in school as a kid. It was awesome to say the least.

RaptureScientist

@Brian Crecente: Gunna need an achievements list then, here's a start:

Sick Performance - Die of Dysentery 100 Times
Pellet Party - Survive the trail only on rabbits
River Dance - Cross 10 Rivers in a row without a ferry and without dying
Merry Christmas - Finish the trail starting in December

BabyInABlender

THAT IS NOT MY MATH BLASTER!

Mechalon

@Falcon PAUNCH!!!: Odelle Lake! Haha nostalgia out of nowhere! Man, good times.

GlassAdam?

+1 for Number Munchers. I would just about kill for a version of this that ran at normal speeds on ANY of today's systems. You would think that some developer out there would understand the modern day gamer's nostalgia for such titles, realize it would take next to NOTHING to produce, and get on it.

Wait. Come to think of it, I could probably code that up and sell it for $9.99 a copy. I'd make a FORTU... *ahem*. NEVERMIND. NOTHING TO SEE HERE FOLKS, JUST MOVE ALONG.

Muzykmann

@Chuco:

I meant Riverdeep's Bailey's Bookhouse, as an added note, alot of the websites do have free demos that you can try online, perfect for a rainy day when the little ones are bored and want to play on the comp.

Chuco

I've worked as a Teaching Assistant for Life Skills class for the past couple of years. Every computer in our classroom had a couple of these games loaded on them and the children absolutly adored them.
As for the educational content it can be a bit iffy at times but overall the children do get something out of it since they take it as having fun.
An austic student of mine loved hopping on Riverdeep's reader rabbit and copying the sounds that he would hear. It was such a great step since he was originally labeled as nonvocal and this game was getting him to exercise and use his vocal chords and phonemic skills.

Chuco

I remember playing Math Blaster and Reader rabbit at school, and there was also this weird game with monkeys in it, and another which was a dinosaur zoo type sim. I've played the Mavis Beacon game too. And Oregon Trail of course; I remember the boys in class would always write silly things on the tombstones.
Computer lab was always a fun time.

@BabyInABlender:
haha, good idea!

Educational games for kids are great, but when it comes to classrooms I think most schools will stick with software that'll work on the PCs they (probably) already have.

em

Putt-Putt Pajama Sam, and Freddie Fish were all better edutainment then this, and its was a randomized click fest... good times good times.

mastergamer1231

@DustySword: Definitely played Reading Blaster.

Honestly I hope they re-release Reading/Writing Blaster as a flash game or something so that we can embed it on the Kotaku comment account signup instead of the Captcha to weed out retard commenters lacking basic reading comprehension skills so people don't have to work so hard with the banhammer.

Actually come to think of it, that would be really money on just about every public forum on the internet. Note to self: take own advice and develop this.

BabyInABlender

As a kid who was bought Master Blaster, Super Solvers, Hooked on Phonics, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago, I felt a little miffed. I could read, write, "math", and "geo-graph" just fine. Hooked on Phonics was the worst. The only thing that piece of crap taught me was to say the alphabet backwards, which might come in handy if I ever get stopped on the way home Friday night.

Edge of Blade

@G-PoNg: Wouldn't it be great to put Oregon Trail on PSN, XBLA and WiiWare?

Brian Crecente

"Just the other day, while attending a dinner with Ken Levine and some other folks during PAX,.."

Just shut your pie hole right now! Aww man.

Mavis Beacon teaches typing was where it's at. And the whole Carmen San Diego series.

Eville1 says SKUse me a sec.

I LOVED MATH BLASTER!

Jorw

We had educational games at school when I was a child too..course they were on those giant floppy disks that were actually floppy....

Ajh

Current-gen consoles are too expensive and one-dimensional to buy just for a few educational games. What's wrong with schools and families using the computers and last-gen systems they already have?

jeangrae

I remember Oregon Trail, Tass Times In Tonetown, Mean 18, California Games, Speedway Math, And some paper airplane launcher one. Some of those thinking about it werent "educational", but we got to play them anyway.

G-PoNg

I remember playing this on my Tandy at home. Damn, I loved that game...

DaveKap

You have died of dysentery.

Number Munchers, hells jess.

MECC FTW!

balls187 upside yo head

*Memories come flooding in.*

remanance

Great point. I remember my computer lab days being spent with Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and SimTown. I was a Sim____ fan for the next several years.

Math Blaster was another great one. Does anyone remember a game where you're a dog running around a neighborhood doing math problems?

bangbangblah

If they bring Treasure Mountain back from the dead, I'll end up buying it for myself rather than any needy kid. Your grammar stinks? Sucks for you, I'm too busy exploring a MOUNTAIN to care about your edumacation.

JackiJinx

@Brian Crecente: I should really know better than to think of any idea as original anymore =)

BabyInABlender

Sir, you've got animu in my Math Blaster! Get it out of there! NOW!

MasterNinja

@BabyInABlender: My brother's web site has new forum folks solve math problems to post.

Brian Crecente

This game is OK but I think there are better ways to leverage games to teach math. My son started playing MB when he was 6, although at that time his mental math skills were a little underdeveloped for some of the challenges. I found that the best way to get him up to speed in math was just to drill him on some plain old pencil-and-paper math exercises, and then reward his progress with some new DS/PC/Wii games (and bonus time to play them). The latter method built more skills faster than just playing math blaster (although there is some cost of buying him the "valuable prizes").
It's amazing how excited a kid can get about spending their free time churning out out pages of math problems when they know there's a copy Lego Star Wars at the end of the tunnel.
The "valuable prizes" strategy also worked really well for getting him to read chapter books.

psychicfriend

@Edge of Blade: Hell yes, Super Solvers. It was like a grown-up Ness taking on a young Dr. Wily.

MysidianMan

Maaan, this takes me back. Edutainment that kicked ass!

Đipic

I think I remember something like this on my first computer...it actually wasn't bad.

HALO-32

Oh my god... it lives!
I played Math Blaster Plus on a 286 with EGA graphics (I think? CGA?) as a kid... not a fan though, I preferred just doing homework. :/

fuchikoma

@JackiJinx: Treasure Mountain! I remember that game from Elementary School, lol. And Math Blaster too for that matter :) Those two and Oregon Trail formed the trifecta of awesomeness that was computer lab during those years. I'd argue that those days did as much to further my development as a gamer as anything out at the time (early-mid 90s). Good times. And yes, a Treasure Mountain remake is exactly what we need.

Aeralindor

Treasure Mathstorm! <3333333333

cheesecake000

You gotta have blue hair.

Lockgar

I would buy Number Munchers or Treasure Cove for XBLA without a moment's hesitation. Heck, if they upped the difficulty to post-college grad levels, I'd buy it retail.

EmTeeZ

I remember there were fights in my grade 4 class just to play this game. Great to see classic coming back to life.

RtFusion

Man, Oregon Trail... that was more or less my first video game. I loved playing it... especially the minigames. Come to think of it, wouldn't Oregon Trail be a perfect fit for the Wii? Wii hunting, Wii fishing, Wii wagon maintenance...

Get on it, you guys.

Nekusagi

@ZinkO: USA WE DA BEST: I hear in the new one, Math Blaster's best friend gets killed and he goes d^2x/dy^2 with rage.

MysidianMan

wow, since when did the Math Blaster crowd have super saiyan forms?
I had Math Blaster AND Reading Blaster, plus the Putt Putt games. The balloon one was the best.

ZinkO: USA WE DA BEST

While math games may seem corny, I personally hold the belief they were responsible for my excellent math abilities to this day. Plus I played them when I was pretty young so I was hardly a critic.

Karl Marx Vladimirs Linens

Wow! I remember playing Math Blaster and Carmen Sandiego on my Apple IIe back in the day.

LCaruana

I remember my little sister had Treasure Mathstorm. That was actually a surprisingly fun little game. And you could grind math problems to unlock little toys.

When I was very little, I actually had some edutainment games on the C64...Sea Speller and Kids on Keys. I used to have a lot of fun with those. I remember Carmen Sandiego and other games like that in school being such so fun that the kids viewed it as being a reward, even though it was educational. They definitely like this stuff, so making more of these games is a good thing.

teraphony

Dood I still own Math Blaster In Search of Spot and Secret of the Lost City. Damn. -_- Hopefully its still around when I purposely have children. =/ Whatever Incarnation on the DS will have to do for him/her/it.

I h8 ph15h with a passion

I hope they have a stochastic calculus version.

msondo

I can't wait. My son loaded up the hard drive of an old computer we had with these games. That crashed and I've balked at him loading them up on my computer. This will be a VERY happy middle.

valoisian

Math Blaster was the highlight of my elementary school experience. I would have LOVED to have that game at home to play when I was a kid. Educational games can be awesome fun. Who could forget "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"

psychobaka

Holy crap! That's what Math Blaster looks like now? Damn, this makes me feel old...

DukeOfPwn

I remember playing the old-school Math Blaster over and over and over again as a kid in Elementary school. And Number Munchers, too. And a ton of other games- Gizmos and Gadgets, Treasure Mathstorm, Jumpstart games, Cluefinders games, Treasure Cove, and The Incredible Machine, just to name a few.

jerair

@Falcon PAUNCH!!!:

I second that. Word Munchers and Number Munchers.

Oh, you can't forget the Oregon Trail.

SnakesSolids

Just imagine a modern day Orgeon Trail. Realistic, Bloody, Dysentery fun!

Kenofthedead

But Halo teaches everything our kids need to know, cursing, corpsehumping, and being an all around smack-tard!

GOLD5

Some of my best memories from my old computer were from playing edutainment games from the early 90's. Stuff like Treasure Mountain and Challenge of the Ancient Empires.

DarthKang

@Brian Crecente: I doubt you will still see this, but I am a big math fan. Any chance your brothers website is public or looking for new members?? Forgive me if this is posted somewhere already.

Scazza

They update Math Blaster by...redesigning him as an anime reject?

urutapu

I remember playing Math blaster on my friend's Mac LC way back when.

Math games are a really, really hard thing to make fun. I didn't think Math blaster did it very well. But i applaud the effort.

I think the approach of making edutainment "animated homework" is sort of backwards. I didn't learn math worth shit in school, basically had to relearn it all when i started finding actual uses for it in programming; school, at least in norway, does a terrible job of teaching the value of what you learn.

What's fun is engineering, putting the REAL 2 and 2 together and make something happen. Solving problems. Learning trig was like a level up for me. Holy shit, i can do THIS now? I think games like The Incredible Machine or Spore are prime examples, where you just do stuff that's fun and NATURALLY learn things.

Sunjammer

Can't wait.

NESSter

Ah I remember Number Munchers and Oregon Trail, about all I would do at school. 3rd(?) edition was the best if I remember right, the old 2d one where you could go hunting in a top-down type view. I remember my library had the 8th edition, wasn't as fun but maybe it was cause I was 8 and didn't really know what was going on.

Treasure Cove was a great game, I played that one so much the disk wouldn't work in my CD drive...

L1GHTN1N

I remember Math Blaster (Davidson, was it?) Kinda neat. Didn't really teach me anything.
And the characters look odd (hideous, even) then as they do now.

judacris

What's with the crazy hair?

[www.coverbrowser.com]
That game was epic.

Poffy

@Scazza: It's actually just a bizarre gate for his forums. The site [www.jenniferann.org] is the one set up to inform about teen dating violence.

Brian Crecente

What the hell happened to him??

ViRiS

This was the best education game ever=3
Right up there with Oregon Trail^.^

Bluesnow222

I am so very stoked. Nintendo should have talked about this at E3, would have made it so much better.

And in fact, the peice of crap Macs that I got to use at my schools turned me off of Macs forever.

Dragonis

I suggest one thing better (or worse XD ):

Math Blaster....THE MOVIE.

Jest

Awesome!

That's a lot better than some of the so called "edutainment" games that are being published these days by large companies (*cough*fisherprice*cough*) that dumb down complex subjects for young kids without grounding them in fundamentals.

Something fun with action that is infinitely replayable, that's the ticket.

Also, I would totally not-so-secretly play this and a Word/Number Munchers remake.

beantastic!

And it stars Son of Captain Planet! Although I think they messed up the title a bit. It should have been: MASTER BLASTER, Math: The Basics.

Protector one

Just to be a wet blanket on this discussion...

For about a year, I was working at a start-up game distribution company as a tester. We had about a week where we (there were two of us testers- we were the only people in the company that knew anything about video games, the company collapsed, don't blame us) must have played through about a hundred educational games from Knowledge Adventure and Riverdeep. These included this Mathblaster title.

Though this is one of the better educational games that I played, as far as the "game" part goes, I wouldn't say it's as good an educational tool as the old school Mathblaster that we had when we were growing up. Honestly, I think it sacrifices a bit too much education to make the platforming work and a bit too much adventure to make the education work. Besides that, unlike the old Mathblaster, where you were constantly switching between a variety of activities, this game is rather monotonous. It's all run and shoot, like a 2.5-D Megaman where you do a bunch of subtraction, multiplication, division, and addition problems.

I don't mean to sound like an old fogey on this, but at this point, I've played the new Carmen Sandiego games. I've played the new Oregon Trail. I've played through so many damn educational games that they have been scarred into my memory. The best part of the educational games was when I discovered that we had a disc for "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?" I booted the game up and there, in all her glory was The Chief. The game had humor, it was fun, it actually was simple enough that the gameplay worked with the educational value, but unfortunately it doesn't work very well with new computers any more. It's built on, I can't quite remember, Quicktime 4.2, I think, which for some reason the new Quicktime does not support AT ALL. (Thanks, Apple!) I then put in the NEW Carmen Sandiego, and I died a little inside. All the humor was gone, replaced with terrible wacky voice acting and annoyingly spastic animations.

Too many people have tried to make games educational instead of making education fun. There's a difference. To look at it as saying, "Let's make this game educational!" you are saying, "I am willing to compromise gameplay elements to add math facts." There is no way to make something this way which does not suffer on either the education front or the game front. You are going to compromise one of your two goals, because you aren't thinking about ways to incorporate fun into education, you're trying to incorporate learning into traditional gameplay mechanics, and since so much of our gameplay mechanics is about twitchy quick movements, the game is going to suffer.

The old school educational games didn't think that way. They were mostly text based games. But they were made in a way to be entertaining. They were designed by people who actually enjoyed what they were doing, and wanted to make a story that you would enjoy following while you were, incidentally, learning about geography. I think that modern creators of educational games have to look at the old school and find out that they're missing something. I've played both, and not just as a kid. I played both last year. Back to back. Today's Educational Games are built ass backwards, and it's a shame.

MallardMan

And I should clarify that I am not against Apple computers' very existence, like some people are. To each his own, I say, and if you like Apples, good for you. It's just that I personally can't stand them.

MechaTama31

Apple's flood of crap into schools served to fuel my rage towards them, not win me over. I hated having to use those damn things at school, and avoid them to this day because of it.

MechaTama31

Someone's gotta help me out. This post reminds me how much I loved a game back in the day and can't remember what it was called.

You were a kid trying to build a race car. Sometimes it was a downhill derby car. Sometimes solar, sometimes motor. You had to go through a series of warehouses and find parts for the car in crates, then put together the best of all the parts, and race it against the bad guy.

Somebody help me out here. I've got an itch to play it, but I have no idea what its called.

RamV10

Oh man, Math blaster. I remember installing and playing this when I was on windows 3.x

If I ever have kids, I'm installing old school math blaster and reading blaster for them .

akumaserge

Weres my Hi Res, current gen

Oregon Trail!!

Ice-9

Kid: Mommy, mommy! I made punk bitches suck it down!

Tycho: That would be ... Reader Rabbit Teaches Typing!

WittyUserName