Discover Top Posts Tagged with #cluefinders

gooseworx and glitch could probably make a shit ton of money and deadass solve the education crisis by making a tadc cluefinders style point and click educational adventure game.

i can can so clearly visualize it too, i made this and everything, not doing your homework because it makes caine sad might actually fucking work.

#shitpost #nudi babbles #cluefinders #tadc #gooseworx #glitch #not doing your homework makes your fave sad would probably fucking work #nudi arts #gif #caine #tadc caine #pixel art

NEW fav floppy/CDROM computer game poll from childhood older Gen Z and millennial edition: games ppl tagged the most not included on the first poll

Zoo Tycoon

Myst

Cluefinders

Doom

Age of Empires

Nancy Drew

Magic School Bus

Barbie

Putt Putt

Something else you put in the tags (they only allow 10!)

Voting ended onMay 5, 2023

#zoo tycoon #myst #age of empires #barbie #nancy drew #magic school bus #doom #poll #computer games #1990s #early 2000s #millennial #gen z #cluefinders #i will do another poll for sim games #and games that came with your computer #putt putt #please reblog

“Mental health damage from the pandemic was minimal” then explain why I made a bunch of memes about the Scholastic ClueFinders PC games.

#just found these #ClueFinders

#cluefinders #kidcore #computer games #schoolcore #the learning company

I played one of my favorite childhood edutainment games: Cluefinders 3rd Grade!!

Here’s a little preview of how it went

the full video can be watched here (parts 2 and 3 will be out in the coming weeks 👀)

#my videos #cluefinders #cluefinders 3rd grade

What was your favorite 90's computer game to play? I was a huge Freddi Fish/Putt-Putt girl, Reader Rabbit Math Ages 6-9 had beautiful island backgrounds and a jamming soundtrack (not to mention it kickstarted my list making obsession since I started writing down the deck items and supplies for the Sea Lion), I owned all of the ClueFinders games at some point, and I never completed Zoombinis Logical Journey because the puzzles were too challenging for me.

Did anyone else play Cluefinders as a kid? They were these edutainment point-and-click adventures, sort of... Indiana Jones by way of Scooby-Doo? These were my jam back in the day, and I went back to them to see how they held up.

And the answer is... uh, there's a surprising range of quality!

Basic Cluefinders knowledge:

The Cluefinders are a group of mystery-solving teens, who, uh. It's not entirely clear how they find clients, but they're apparently world-renowned for it.

Joni, the redhead with the glasses, is the leader. She is spunky and belligerent and likes to punch problems until they're not problems.

Owen, the green shirt kid, is Shaggy. He talks in surfer dude slang and likes to eat. He's just Shaggy.

Leslie is Velma. Just Velma. That's kind of it. She uses big words and knows about science and things.

Santiago is also there. He has a phone? I think his trait is that he has a phone.

Laptrap is the mascot character and the game's menu. He is a hovering robot turtle thingy. His job is to be scared of things and complain about them. Both entirely reasonable reactions to the things that are happening! He is nonetheless treated as an embarrassing wet blanket and deserves better.

3rd Grade is weirdly the best one, I think? And the first one they made, indicating that the budget dried up at some point. It's this kind of mystery about an evil dragon that's been terrorizing a magic jungle full of living plants and talking monkeys and stuff, and it's got like 20 different educational minigames that teach and test various skills. The writing is like, very stupid and for-kids, but not offensively so. It all comes together with a twist villain that they foreshadow pretty well over the course of the game.

And there's musical numbers!

Fun stuff! I was kind of surprised by how well it held up. The others... did not, as much.

The fourth grade one is... bad. It has this structure where there's just four minigames, and you have to do them over and over and over and over again to get enough "Cairoglyphs" to proceed. Proceed how? An old man decrypts them and tells you clues. What clues? Don't even worry about it. Once you get enough of those, we switch to a second phase of the game that's also doing four minigames over and over and over again, this time to get gems to get past way too many doors in an ancient temple. It drags things out so much.

And the rest of it is... truly bizarre. Everyone's drawn totally off-model. It's narrated by a talking dog with a Brooklyn accent who's treated like a core member of the group despite never showing up again, and concerns... uh, a plot by an evil egyptologist to resurrect Set and take over the world? Maybe? It's very weird and loosely-sketched. Like... nothing connects.

The badguy is a comically extreme Dan Backslide ne'er-do-well, and he's the only part of the game that's any fun. I love him. He does not have a motive. He does not have a reason to kidnap "the professor" who the player's stated goal is to save. The professor appears to only exist for this guy to gloat to about how evil he is to. He dies almost immediately upon realizing his ultimate ambition when the evil god he resurrects predictably fails to recognize the authority of his summoner. Could not be more stereotypical, but the voice actor is clearly having the time of his life and the energy is infectious.

The rest, though... The Cluefinders' connection to this kidnapped professor is something it has no interest in describing, apparently banking on the audience's willingness to accept that they must just be walking in on an episode of a show whose background was established earlier (it wasn't).

It's hard to even describe how silly the climax of this one is. You... collect gemstones from talking mice on behalf of a sinister cat, who lets you into a temple where various ancient Egyptian gods congratulate you on being so smart and give you entirely useless superpowers.

Joni gets "bravery" (a costume change, she was already brave), Leslie gets "intelligence" (a costume change, she was already the Smart One), Owen gets flight (a costume change, useful precisely Never for any of the puzzles that involve finding a way to cross over a pit), and Santiago gets "strength" (a costume change, useful precisely never for any of the puzzles that involve finding a way past a heavy stone door). Then, in short order, you arrive at the villain's lair somehow, too late to stop his evil plan! But then, you do anyway! By, uh...

...you, um... it all happens in a cutscene, and I couldn't follow the mechanics of it at all, but there was some kind of mechanism in the temple? And they had Santiago lift up some pillars? And this somehow resulted in Set falling into a bottomless pit and that's the end?

I... I dunno, man. I dunno what happened here.

The 5th Grade one is pretty wild. There's like, a floating island that eats people? It collects castaways from across various time periods, somehow, and shlorps them down into some bottomless pits that appear out of nowhere, and you gotta figure out what's up.

The writing is like... weirdly... I wouldn't call it good, but the writers put their actual-writer hats on for it. There's one minigame that's like a reading comprehension thing, where there's all these lore journal entries from various survivors ruminating on their situation (and they're broken up into paragraphs and scrambled so you have to put them in the right order for the entry to make sense), and you get this kind of background on the culture clash of castaways from different time periods banding together to avoid being eaten by the island (and ultimately failing).

Gameplay's pretty bad, though. 3rd Grade had 20 different minigames, 4th Grade generously had 13, and this one's got eight. In terms of reusing content by making you do the same thing over and over to bypass arbitrary obstacles, it's one of the worst offenders.

There is this guy, though:

There's a minigame where... god, it's such an off-the-wall justification for the minigame, but- it's a geography minigame about reading maps and stuff. There'll be various cities or states or countries on a map, and you start at one and need to reach another target one, and you have a bunch of rules written down like "don't pass through Illinois" or "you must cross the Mississippi river twice", and then use a limited number of options to chart a path from point A to point B that satisfies all the conditions. Kind of fun, honestly.

But this guy- the fluff for it is that he's the notorious Cryptile Thief. He stole everyone's cryptiles, and to keep them safe, he threw them into, uh...

...this small grove of piranha plants. He knows how to get them back, because he knows some safe paths through the evil flytrap cluster, somehow. But he wrote down his paths in code, basically, in the form of those constrained maps. No explanation is given for how he mapped real-world geography problems to flytrap-safe loot routes, but supposedly it Just Works. Problem is, he got locked up by the villagers for stealing everyone's cryptiles, and can't get out.

(No, it is not explained why in the world the villagers had a bunch of cryptiles and why they valued them or what he was trying to accomplish by stealing them.)

But then while he was in the stocks the ground opened up and slowly devoured all the other villagers one by one, including the ones with the fucking key, so unless someone goes and saves them, he'll be stuck here forever. It's kind of grim! It's unclear how the time-warping aspect works, and how long this guy's actually been here. Is he immortal and he's been here for three hundred years, or did all this happen yesterday? He acts like it was yesterday, but there's also a crazy old man castaway who acts like it's been decades at least.

Anyway, 6th Grade was, if I recall correctly, about an underground army of sentient mutant plants plotting an invasion of the surface world, but this was apparently when they discovered 3D graphics and did a lot of experimental bullshit under the hood that no longer works on modern computers. It kept crashing on room transitions when it was trying to do fancy 3D effects. Womp womp.

The only other one of these I played (besides some sort of... weird day planner software that wasn't really a game) was Math Adventures, which I remember being my favorite as a kid but I couldn't tell you why. It was based around this logic cube thing, where- after completing minigames for villagers- you'd get clues that would let you eliminate possible culprits, until you got down to one and could corner them.

Culprits of what? There's this remote Himalayan village where the village's treasures have all been mysteriously stolen. Somehow the Cluefinders get wind of this and go to solve it, and then... you play eight minigames over and over again.

Structurally, it's very weird. You corner the culprit, and invariably it's one of the minigame host NPCs who just says "okay, yes, I took this thing and hid it here, but it's because I was being threatened by the yeti! So we're cool, right?" and then the village chief goes yeah, "we're cool, we're not going to have you face any consequences for this." (If they went to jail, how could you play their minigame fifteen more times?) Repeat, yes, fifteen times, until you've recovered all eight treasures. Yes. There's duplicates of these priceless unique treasures, for no apparent reason. I think they designed it around eight and then decided to double it to pad it out???

Some of the minigames are cool and challenging, like the one where ice blocks fall from a conveyor belt and you have to form them into valid math equations. Others are...

...a really shoddily-implemented breakout clone where you have to catch numbers to solve equations, but the game can only handle three numbers onscreen at once so actually being good at breakout is actively disadvantageous because breaking too many blocks at once just makes it harder to hit blocks later. Or... uh... the second one there, where, um... these blobs of purple goo with numbers on them come down a track, and you need to shoot them at these shelves to splat the right numbers into place based on the graph to the left. It gets insanely hard later in the game, because there'll be three rows of shelves and three graphs and the graphs will stop conveniently locking to the marked numbers so you have to try and eyeball whether that line on the line graph which bends between 20 and 30 is doing so at 26 or 27. If you ever get one wrong you instafail and have to reset. Ugh.

(Why is this happening in a library? What are we accomplishing? How does any of it help this woman remember a clue to the mystery? Not one second of thought is spared for these questions.)

Anyway the ultimate culprit was the only NPC who doesn't have a minigame and only shows up in the opening cutscene to loudly blame the stolen treasures on the yeti and insist that everyone give up on finding them. This was not even surprising to me when I was eleven years old. Very lame.

I never had any of the rest of them! I'm kinda curious to play them and see what I was missing, even though I kind of don't expect any of them to have been good.

Anyone else remember these things? Or know what was going on with the one with the scary clown rollercoaster or the evil toy store?

#cluefinders #long post