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8/7/26 - More on Word Rescue

I sort of wanted my little trick for overcoming indecision to come off as a bit more profound in my last post. There is a lot wrapped up in it, but honestly I don't think I came up with something that new.
There is a lot to be said about the abundance of choice, especially these days. Back when something like Word Rescue was new, you didn't have many games to choose from. You just had the one or two games your Mum bought for you, plus a couple that you copied from friends or whatever, and that was it. If you wanted to play a game, your decision was more or less made for you. That emotion that I described - where every option seems OK, except I'm worried that if I pick it I'll be missing out on something better - is a weird one. It's just another example of how the human mind is irrational and doesn't always think in ways that serve its own interest. The fact that I was able to bypass that phenomenon by forcibly removing choice is testament to the fact. The result is the same - I'm playing one game, which means I'm not playing any of the others. And in this case, it's absolutely clear that there are better games I could be playing. Yet somehow none of that bothered me anymore when the coins came down. Like I said - I laughed. It's a silly, not serious game, absolutely not made for my demographic. Yet I respected the random decision, and actually found myself immediately looking forward to playing. For the record, some of the games I put on my list were things like Darklands, Commander Keen 6, and Wing Commander.

As for the game itself - well, I'm really not sure what the educational value of it is. Even on the easiest difficulty, I think the motor skills required are fairly advanced. Any kid in the early 90s capable of actually getting to grips with the controls would be well mature enough to already know all the words the game is supposedly trying to teach them. It really just feels like one of those games to hoodwink parents - let the kids play this fun game because it is supposedly teaching them something.
And it is fun, if you're partial to those early 90s EGA platform games, like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Monster Bash or Captain Comic. The controls are decent, the settings are charming, and the levels go by quick. Sometimes the enemy placement is a bit annoying - I was screwed up a few times by gruzzles dropping unexpectedly out of the sky onto my head before I could react, but that's really my biggest complaint. Over all three episodes the level variety stayed fresh enough that I never really got bored, helped by the fact that it's a very short game - I only played it for less than an hour at a time and finished it over a weekend.