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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

I've heard of this game a lot but this is the first time I played it. It was... really easy? That was unexpected. Wife got typhoid and dysentery but she survived. Baby broke an arm and a leg somehow but also survived.

At a glance it would seem like buying food is for chumps and you can easily get tons of food very quickly with hunting for a fraction of the price. Although the banker class has so much wealth they can just buy enough supplies to breeze through the entire journey up front.

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Re>> "It was... really easy"

Says the guy posting on Hacker News in the year 2022. Tell that to my 6 year old self in 1990 who didn't have a computer at home and only used a computer once a week for an hour during "computer lab" time and had to share with 2 other kids equally as dumb as myself on some old Tandy computer. Personally, I much preferred Lemmings.

Eh. Yeah sure things are hard for kids who aren't very good at figuring out basic concepts. But a lot of games from that era were actually genuinely really hard and still are. I just thought this one was supposed to be a really tough game.

Haha, yes. I was being a bit snarky, I apologize if that didn't quite come through. You are completely right; it is a very easy game. I went back and played it through about 5 or 6 years ago and was surprised by how easy it was compared to my memory. I suspect that many people who played it as ankle-biters themselves probably have a skewed memory of its difficulty.

Many of the difficult games from that era were game games ~ they were difficult be design, to be brain teasers. The Oregon Trail, by comparison, falls into the educational games specifically aimed at lower-elementary school. Similar games from my school's weekly computer lab...

- Treasure Mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HAxdTacsgQ

- Reader Rabbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re-3D8TSYd8

- Mixed Up Mother Goose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r28woUwTib0

- Where In The World is Carmen San Diego https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL-13NZAXuE

I played Mixed Up Mother Goose as a child and later took a job at the same company as one of the developers (not Sierra or Mattel). It was kind of disorienting.

Now try as the farmer. It was easy because you were a banker.

farmer is easy too. buy like 6 pairs of oxen, 5 sets of clothes, spare of wheel/axel/tongue. and the vast majority of the rest on bullets with like 100lb of food to just get you started

then you just hunt and hunt and hunt and hunt. and only shoot at bison/bears and the occasional pair of deers.

and then you trade primarily trading food for anything else (as food is cheap to you, 100lb should just cost 1-3 bullets on average depending how bad a shot you are)

For an extra challenge I play on hard mode: Spend all your money on grandfather clocks.

This is what I planned to do for a second run as farmer. I got hit with a fire and lose all my clothes near the start. I found that to be pretty funny. Hunting was too tedious to see if it was still a viable run in the long run.

Hunting was half the fun though!

I would agree if you were allowed to leave once you collected all the meat you could carry.

That mattered less (mostly) when you were six and the alternatives were Mavis Beacon or a multiplication worksheet :-)

I remember racing to complete multiplication worksheets for candy prizes. They were super fun.

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