LEARNING COMPANY Oregon Trail 5th Edition (Windows/Macintosh) 
Category: Entertainment > Games
Good
6
I own the II edition and now the 5th edition. They did make some improvements, like you can now go fishing and gather your own fruit and veggies any time. The hunting is the same. They added a neat story feature that provides some nice history and education with animated characters. You can click to bypass it anytime but it's fun to listen to. They also added a feature where you can watch your wagon cross the river so you can watch and see if it gets stuck or tips over (or, if you're fording the river, you can see it get completely flooded). I still think there is a LOT of room for improvement in the game (better animation, more help and tips, etc) but it's still a fun game to play. I played it on my PC with XP with no problems at all. I also have a Mac OS X and I did have a problem while trying to install. To run on a mac, it requires the "New York" font, which my particular Mac did not have by default. So I actually had to go on a different mac computer, copy the font onto a flash drive, and then copy it onto my mac. Then the game installed just fine. A strange quirk IMO...why can't they just include the font with the game so people don't have to hassle with it?
8
I was very happy with this game- it took the bets parts of the previous Oregon Trail incarnations and wove them together for a good overall product. I can appreciate a company which recognizes both the weaknesses and the strengths of their products and uses this information to get better. In this Oregon Trail you can once again chose how many you will travel with and name them (for some crazy reason this feature was eliminated in the 4th Oregon Trail edition), but you can also CHOOSE the times you stop to collect wild fruit or fish, instead of these circumstances just happening randomly (which does not make as much sense). To me, these were the biggest changes to previous games, but they were improvements.
Aside from the above changes, the basics of the game remain the same, and it will look familiar to those who have played other editions. A few things have been updated, particularly some aspects concerning Native Americans and some geography, but the good times still keep rolling.
12
I'm just putting in my 2 cents to contradict the previous reviewer...this version is totally different than the earliest version he is remembering. Quite sophisticated, teaches history and some natural science in an engaging video format.
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Bad
4
I had really enjoyed other games in the series (in my opinion Oregon Trail 2 is the best because of the many choices for start date/time, start city, and destination), and was really looking forward to this game, but unfortunately, I could not get it to run on my machine (a PC with Windows XP). There was no patch or detailed help readily available, and the online advice I found (after hunting around quite a bit) was not helpful.
