If my years wasted in front of my Super NES have taught me anything, it's that I will never ever succeed at owning an airline business, thwarting an alien invasion without using "up up down down left right left right b a start", and having the ability to pretend I find anything remotely entertaining about games from the edutainment genre. The genre never managed to take flight yet still plunks out a title or two every now and then to take away the responsibility of teaching from the parents who complain when Mortal Kombat causes little Jimmy to start smoking pot. This serves a look at some of the SNES pioneers of this bold new wilderness of not fun.

Wordtris

This is a game loosely based on the Tetris theme of God tossing down random blocks. The catch? This one is using letters to spell words instead of using blocks to form lines and needed to be made about as badly as a sequel/prequel to Dumb and Dumber. Wordtris manages to take everything fun about its predecessor (not saying much since the number of fun things you can do in Tetris reaches a grand total of 1) and completely annihilates it in favor of a game where you spend the entire time trying to spell words out of every letter of the alphabet. This may not seem to be too terrible on the surface, but I'm pretty sure the chances of you ever getting a vowel are the same as those of getting any other letter. So unless you can somehow program this game to recognize some sort of moon people dialect that revolves strictly around the use of consonant sounds, you're probably going to be to fail miserably as your brain attempts to make words such as "stit" and "lerg" exist as the blocks tediously trickle down your screen. This game really only qualifies as a member of the edutainment genre because it was somehow supposed to improve our vocabularies. As it stands, no child on the planet found any joy in this, and it is as fun as attempting to batter down a door with your own testicles. The educational part of the game falls short, as any and every child with a short attention span would devote a few seconds to it attempting to spell out dirty words and giving up whenever this fails.

Mario is Missing

Every few years Nintendo allows Luigi to snag the spotlight in a game to make him seem like he sucks just a little bit less. This installment of the series, based around the idea of Mario being kidnapped, allows you to take control of Luigi on a world tour to find Mario. Well, the game claims it's Luigi, but it would seem that Mario just accidentally slipped into Luigi's clothes while fumbling around their king size bed of love in the dark. THE MYSTERY IS REVEALED! As you play the game you travel from location to location where you are forced to jump on Koopas to reclaim artifacts from the area. You then must return these items to their rightful places. Apparently there are many people wandering around with fakes of the entire frickin' ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because you have to answer trivia questions presented in order to successfully return the items. These questions often range from "The Statue of Liberty is an enormous ______." to "When was the Coliseum built?" Even if you don’t know the answers to any of the questions you can always just look at a pamphlet full of knowledge that you will probably forget before you even answer the question because every electric pulse your brain transmits is sending the same message of "God damn I want to die!" After you return every monument piece in a level, you have to figure out where you are and call Yoshi to pick you up. This repeats on and on for many levels only to be occasionally interrupted by boss fights in which YOU CANNOT DIE NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU WANT TO! Oh, and you will want to my friends.

Nintendo Power's Totally Accurate Preview - "Besides learning about world culture, you'll learn how to navigate around a map and use various resources like the computer."

If by "using a computer" it means "clicking 1 of 5 buttons on a screen called a computer", then this game is a fine example of it, indeed. Then again I suppose this really isn't much of a stretch of the truth since the majority of home computers from this era really did have about five functions and were primarily owned by rich people who still don't know how to use them but feel the need to be living on the cutting edge of technology.

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

How this game show managed to keep floating on the sea of dumb ideas still amazes me. I remember tuning in every day to watch the latest group of retarded 10 year olds demonstrate just how little they really know about the world by failing miserably at answering simple geographical questions like:

France is a ____
A: body of water
B: alien empire
C: movie theater in Louisiana
D: country

The show would systematically eliminate each contestant until the one child was left standing. This kid would attempt to catch Carmen by running to and fro placing lamps on cities in countries whenever the host would call out the name of the place. Occasionally a child would luck up and Carmen would be somewhere in United States, but the saddest part lies in how children would often wander around confused whenever posed with the task of finding Texas or some other large and useless hunk of land. No offense to those of you reading this in Texas. Your fine state has produced lots of very useful things like cowboys and cowboy hats. The video game version of this series takes on a more serious subject matter as it makes learning a lot less fun. For starters it was packaged with a copy of the 1992 World Almanac. Great. Now I have a portable reference guide in case I’m ever kidnapped by some insane tribesmen who will only free me if I can give the average rainfall in Argentina for that year. The game itself is a droning repetition of clicking a couple of buttons to talk to people and find out what character to arrest and what city to go to next. PARTY OVERLOAD!

Mario Paint

I actually enjoyed this game a lot. In a way I'd consider it the first graphic designing program I ever used. Though it pales by today's standards of digital art, it was fun back in the day. I could never really draw anything that looked like what it was supposed to resemble, all of the music I made was basically just a drum being bashed at a fast rate with an occasional saxophone blast thrown on top, and my animations jerked around more than an epileptic kid in a room full of flashing screens. Still, I had fun trying.

Nintendo Power's Totally Accurate Preview - "Studies have shown that people who grow up using computers have an advantage in today's world over those who aren't computer literate. In the past, reading and writing were the basic skills you needed. Now you have to be able to use computers, as well."

Oh, you have this twisty turny concept of computers wrapped all around your little finger, Nintendo Power!

Sim City - Sim Earth

Sim City

Sim City is a game designed to teach young children about the exciting world of city planning and crumble their self-esteem as they watch their labor of love quickly crumble into a town of ghettos and park muggings. It teaches us all about exciting concepts like zoning and what to do when Bowser attacks your rural Nebraskan community. Sim City, upon its release, was dubbed as incredibly realistic in that it followed the principles of people not enjoying living by factories or power plants and police departments make people not kill each other.

The most edutaining experience of this game comes in the knowledge that if you ever become mayor of Tokyo and decide to burn it down the always aspiring citizens will still need a seaport to export rice cakes and hentai.

Nintendo Power's Totally Accurate Preview - "Sim City is a ton of fun!"

Sim Earth

Taking Sim City to the next level of horrible, Sim Earth allows you to go beyond playing the role of a simple mayor and gives you the powers of a God. As this God, you perform incredibly fun-filled tasks such as adjusting the core temperature of the planet or raising the water levels, both of which are sure to make any 9-13 year old's heart palpitate with glee. The game is so fun, in fact, that you'll probably spend a good chunk of your time staring blankly at the screen wondering just why every animal on the planet is becoming extinct as your planet lapses into chaos whenever you crank up the thermostat a couple of degrees.

Aerobiz

I'm a pretty big fan of the strategic warfare games Koei has produced over the years. Nobunga's Ambition and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games have always been worthy of at least a rent or two. For some reason Koei decided to hop into the airplane business only to create this 9/11 disaster of a game. In it you take the role of a budding executive in an airline business as you and your company attempt to claw your way to the top and create a monopoly on all things that fly. Granted, every kid wants to be successful at life, but I think real world transactions are a little more complicated than "do I buy this plane or do I buy this plane or do I buy this other plane?" and "should we fly to New York or Australia?" I remember reading about this game, along with several others, in Nintendo Power and thinking it would be a neat game. This one only served as another blow to my self-esteem as everything that could go wrong did and more often than not sent me into a spiral of bankruptcy and failure. This is another reason I vent my misplaced aggression on the Internet.

In conclusion, I have no idea why a good many of these games exist. I also have no idea how Maxis continues to score limitless amounts of cash with its Sims franchise, and I certainly don't understand how oversimplified versions of big business can possibly be entertaining or educational. I don't understand anything about how to be an omnipotent being, and I fail to see how Carmen Sandiego managed to stay on the lamb for so long. I guess what I'm trying to say is the only thing I've really learned from edutainment games is that I should have spent more money on drugs and hookers and less money on games that never taught me or kept me occupied.