Maths Amusantes

Reviewing "edutainment" Odyssey² games, so many years after they were originally released, is a difficult task. Even more than most Odyssey² titles, Maths Amusantes is a relic of a bygone era. The game's grade-school arithmetic problems hold no interest for even the most nostalgic adults, and today's kids certainly wouldn't be impressed by a video game featuring stick-figure characters and barely more than two on-screen colors. Maths Amusantes's day has simply passed. To write a fair review, the best I can do is to try to peel back the years and attempt to picture Maths Amusantes as a kid in 1980 would have.

When viewed that way, Maths Amusantes doesn't look too bad. Remember, it hails from a time when just answering simple math problems interactively on a screen was a marvel (witness the game Math-A-Magic!, for example). Maths Amusantes deserves credit for incorporating even a simplistic action game into its virtual classroom. In this game, two players are posed a simple equation such as "1 + 2 = ?" Then the players must race to grab the correct answer(s) from among the many stock Odyssey² characters floating in circles on the playfield. Players are awarded points for each correct answer they grab. The winner is the first to reach ten points.

The game is exclusively aimed at children, and the challenges are quite suitable. One impressive concession Maths Amusantes makes for its youthful audience is the way that some equations have multiple solutions. For example, consider an equation featuring two squares on one side. Players are asked to fill in the other side of the equation. They could do it by selecting two squares, or by selecting the "2" symbol and a square. Very young children might have trouble thinking of the second solution, so it's nice that the game recognizes both. This may not have made Maths Amusantes the amazing teaching aid that its manual claimed it to be, but by 1979 standards, it's actually pretty good. It's not too difficult to picture two little kids back then, having fun during a heated game of Maths Amusantes, and maybe even learning something while doing it.

But now we're in the twenty-first century, and it's much more tempting to make fun of Maths Amusantes than to praise it. So I succumbed and wrote an In-Depth Review of the game, which is primarily a flimsy excuse to present "I've Got Your IQ Number!": a 10-question interactive quiz determined to measure your intelligence... or total lack thereof. Go take it now. Hopefully you'll enjoy it more than Maths Amusantes. That game may have been fine for its day, but that day has well and truly passed.

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