Trail, or rather a new iteration of it for 2018. And it's being sold at a suggested

price of $25 US dollars. This is a dedicated electronic handheld unit based

on the classic edutainment game that was made most famous on the Apple II in the

mid-1980s However as fondly remembered as that version is that is not exactly

what you're getting here. In fact what you get is a little bit more advanced

than I expected, more on that in a moment. But yeah for now just look at this thing, man!

I'm always fascinated by dedicated handhelds,

I loved getting those Tiger electronics things back in the day even though they

pretty much all sucked. But this is thankfully a lot better than that. But

somewhat annoyingly it is exclusive to Target stores in the USA, at least as I'm

recording this video. And no this is not sponsored, they didn't send it to me or

anything, I didn't get it for free. I just saw it on the shelf and bought it

because it looked cool. It turns out Target is no stranger to selling

exclusive Oregon Trail products, they also released this Oregon Trail card

game a year or two ago by Pressman. Similar packaging but it's just a card

game. I'm not huge into card games but I picked it up anyway because I like

Oregon Trail products. Anyway this electronic version is manufactured by

Basic Fun which is a division of The Bridge Direct. I've never owned anything

of theirs but I have seen some of them hanging around various shops. Especially

these miniature arcade machines, those were kind of impressive I thought. But yeah this is the

first one of their thingies that I have picked up and you know what? I'm just

ready to get inside of this thing because I mean just look! "Set out on the

trek from Independence, Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley!" Ah, many fond

memories of playing Oregon Trail games over the years, so let's jump into the

box and see what you get inside. Yeah there's little twisty things, just

twist off of there and now there you go. You got one of those little pull tabs to

get the included batteries doing their thing and to get the store demo mode

disabled. And say hello to The Oregon Trail unit itself! A rather compact

little thing about the size of a Game Boy Color, definitely a good bit thicker

than that though. And to me it actually looks a

a little bit like a Macintosh, like an earlier compact Mac. Anyway down here you

have some controls which are, well... they don't feel great let's put it that way.

Cheap, gummy, plasticky things with a rather bizarre d-pad here. You have these

diagonals and cardinal directions then these other keys for enter, the wagon

for the menu, got the sound on and off and a yes or no button for different

questions in game. And you also get a little black and white fold out

instruction manual which pretty much just tells you to play the game. But if

you've played practically any Oregon Trail iteration over the past

30-something years then you'll be right at home because this really is a classic

iteration that has been redone to fit in this handheld form. Press the power

button and it powers on and yep, you get a backlit two-and-a-half inch LCD screen.

It's quite sharp, very readable. This is what I was impressed with, I was

not expecting this to look this "nice," relatively speaking. Yeah, sorry about the

dust and like, scratches. A lot of that is underneath the plastic when I got it.

I tried to clean it up as much as I could but you know. Anyway here you go, this is

The Oregon Trail! And it is the classic game, really. I've covered this

before on LGR many years ago, but the gist of the gameplay is you're a person,

or a family really or group of people, that are trying to get from the east coast to

the west coast of the United States in the mid-1800s. And there are different

difficulty levels depending on who you choose to be from the start. So the

banker has the most money and the carpenter is kind of in the middle and

the farmer's like "nyeh." You can name your leader and four members of your party

which is always an opportunity to have some fun with the naming. And before

setting off on your trek you have to buy some equipment and supplies. And you'll

need to buy, at minimum, some oxen to pull you along. And then you have the option

to get as much food, clothing, ammunition, and spare parts as you want and/or need.

And there you go, you're ready to start! "Good luck! You have a long and difficult

journey ahead of you."

*chiptune Yankee Doodle plays*

So yeah you not only get a full-color screen but a pretty decent little sound

chip that plays chip tunes and PCM sounds! It doesn't have a headphone out

jack so I couldn't get a direct recording but yeah, it sounds pretty

darned acceptable for this tiny little thing. This is a conversion of sorts

of one of the classic versions of the game, and if I had to guess it seems to be

based on the 1989/1990 MS-DOS version of the game, at least judging by these

graphics. It's not identical obviously, they've modified it a bit to be on this

tiny little screen. But it's definitely not the Apple II version, I mean, compared

to that it just doesn't look anything like it. I'm assuming though that they just

made their own version for this specific type of hardware because it's not a

direct emulation of any version of the game that I've ever played or seen. It's

just kind of a mishmash of a few different things. Anyway at this point it

really is just The Oregon Trail: you're going around trying not to die,

attempting to ford rivers and failing spectacularly, and running into all kinds

of problems like heat and broken arms and of course cholera and the infamous

dysentery. And every so often you get a nice little screen with some nice little

music that plays and lets you know where you are on your trek across the United States.

*nice little chiptune plays*

And as gummy, and imprecise, kind of clunky feeling as that

directional pad is for up, down, left, and right, it's fine for the menus. I never

had any problem navigating and pressing enter. It's, again, a bit gummy but it's fine.

This is not like a quick reaction type of game, you're really just navigating

menus for the most part. And for that it is perfectly adequate. However one of the

key parts of The Oregon Trail is the hunting minigame and this is a bit of a

different story as far as controls go. You still have your cardinal directions

but you also have to use those diagonal keys that are around the directional

diamond. It made hunting way more difficult than it needed to be and the

animals move just as fast as they would on other versions of the game from what

I could tell, so they didn't seem to make any concessions for this slightly

awkward control scheme. I was just wasting ammo left and right. Yeah that is

a little disappointing, I don't know why they couldn't have put a little tiny

joystick on there or a more traditional directional pad. Oh well it's completely

playable though and I was able to get through the entire game without dying.

Well I mean, a whole lot of my people died, I think I might have been the only

one left by the end, but hey! I made it and that is all that matters. Look at all

the other people that have played who haven't actually played because I'm the

only one to have played this unit. Unfortunately I didn't run across any

""peperony and chease" on the trail so I guess this is not based on that

particular version that was distributed back in the day. But I didn't expect it

to because as I said I believe this is a custom version that is mixing together

different aspects of different Oregon Trail releases. I don't know about you

but I was kind of curious to get inside of this thing and see what was going on.

Check out these craptastic batteries that it came with it, I do not trust these

at all. They felt like they have the weight of toothpicks, they were just

cheap and pathetic. But hey at least it came with them. So getting the unit open

is thankfully very simple: you just have four Phillips head screws, one in each

corner, and there you go -- it pops right open. And there's not much going on

inside as you might expect for a handheld that costs $24.99. And as

expected this little PCB right here you got this epoxy resin crap that's

covering up the chips. So I don't know exactly what they are and I'm not gonna

try to peel that off there. But if you see the board right there, it's a little

bit of a different layout, but it has the same number as

others that I've seen in certain videos: E156176. The video

I'm specifically thinking of is this one by The 8-bit Guy that he did on the

company's other mini tabletop arcades. The board is very similar, in fact it has

that same number on there and everything, but the layout is a little bit different.

So yeah I guess they're just sort of repurposing these electronics for

whatever they need to over in China, which is pretty darned interesting to me.

I don't know the specifics of it, maybe somebody else can figure out if it is

like a Famicom clone NES on a chip type of thing, I don't know man.

So what you end up with is a standalone version of The Oregon Trail that plays a

lot like what you remember, but is a new thing in a new form factor. And it's just

dedicated Oregon Trail on the go! I like this idea, I don't know about you, and I

have a feeling these are gonna start becoming collectibles. Maybe they already

are, so if you can I recommend picking one of them up if you're interested in a

little handheld Oregon Trail. And I'm also really curious if anybody's gonna

be able to like, hack these things to do something else. I'd be down for a

portable Super Solvers Spellbound, just throwing that out there. Carmen Sandiego

something like that? Yeah man bring on the portable edutainment machines! Anyway,

that is it for this episode of LGR and I hope that you enjoyed checking out this

little thingy. And if you did, well, stick around. I do more videos every Monday and

Friday and occasionally I'll cover something like this that strikes my

fancy even though it's a little bit different than what I normally do. But

that's okay, I hope. And as always thank you very much for watching!