Like most of my generation, I was lucky enough to be in an elementary school classroom that had one of those “state-of-the-art” educational machines known as the Apple IIe. It had all the best educational games - from Carmen Sandiego, to Oregon Trail, to - well, OK, just those two.
While awash in nostalgia about those days recently, I found myself reminiscing about a particular game that I can’t for the life of me remember. It was set on an island. As the game opens, you are informed that a hurricane will strike the island in exactly 400 hours, and that you have until then to build a house to protect yourself from the elements. In order to collect pieces to build your house, you must drive around the island (which is shown in a top-down display) in your little car and stop at various houses, whose inhabitants pose trivia questions to you with house pieces in exchange for the correct answer. Getting wrong answers subtracted hours until the hurricane hit, which gradually ticked down on its own as you drive around, and there was also a troll who could stop you on the road and take 30 hours away from you if you didn’t answer his question correctly.
Once you built your house, you could either weather out the storm and proceed to the next level to build a bigger house (by answering harder questions) before another hurricane hit in another 400 hours, or you could trade your house for a half-built house on the next level and try to finish it before your remaining time ran out. If you beat that level, the same deal applied, and you now got to build a castle by answering the hardest questions of all.
I’ve tried Googling all the relevant terms I can think of and drawn a blank. Does this game sound familiar to any other Gen-Y-ers out there?
