Game

It’s time for a bunch of Apple II games! Every three months RA chooses a console to make a bunch of sets for, and then you can do those sets for points towards an event. So expect a bunch of Apple II games for a bit. The thing about Apple II games is that a lot of them are edutainment, and a lot of them are short and don’t have much to them. This is both of those things.

This is a game by someone you’ve never heard of, John Boeschen, and published by a company you’ve never heard of, Silver, Burdett, & Ginn Inc. There’s a lot of these on Apple II. This game is very simple. You take the role of a biologist on the space station, and you need to find the correct growing conditions for food so you can feed people on the station.

Game

You can study the different plants and processes, reading about what photosynthesis is and whatnot, but this is basically not helpful. You can also practice growing plants, choosing their level of water, sunlight, and heat. You can give each of these in units up to 3. Obstensively you’re supposed to read the descriptions of each of the crops you’re trying to grow to determine what needs less water/heat, but I found that it feels kinda random, even with what the notes say about how much heat beans need or whatever. But if you find the perfect 100% growing conditions, then they’re that forever. You just need to find the correct conditions and write down notes of them.

After that, you have the text mode, where it’ll ask you to get a specific amount of food grown from three random crops, maybe with a challenge condition, like you have less units to work with than usual. And that’s just putting in the numbers you recorded earlier. Sometimes it’s impossible to get a perfect score, but don’t worry, if you don’t want to do a specific challenge, you can ask Houston to give you another! Wow how helpful.

Obviously, I don’t think this has much educational value, and barely any gameplay or entertainment value either. It’s interesting as a historical curiosity though. A look into what education was like in 1987. It wasn’t much better than it is now, frankly.