gamingeek said:

I just bought the sequel. I didn't finish the first.


I was enjoying it till I hit this chamber with ridiculous difficulty.

As much as I loved the original, I never felt the need to play the sequel. It was all nicely wrapped up, and adding more to it just seemed unnecessary.

#54 - Gold Rush!

Back in the day if Sierra Online put out a new adventure game, I bought it or at the very least played it. Growing up, my best friend and I pretty much had a system in place so that between the two of us, we would get all of the Sierra games. I think the only exception was Mixed Up Mother Goose, because we weren't 5. But everything else was fair game. That said, Gold Rush! was still kind of a hard sell. It wasn't linked to any particular series, and it was already kind of dated when it was released, as Sierra had moved its bigger properties to a new interface with better looking graphics. In the PC world at this time, that pretty much made it look archiac. The one thing it had going for it though? It was cheap. Sierra knew it was a tough sell, so it came out at a discounted price. And as a broke middle school kid, that was appealing to me.

Good thing it was cheap, because if not I would have missed out on a delightful adventure game and fun bit of edutainment. The game starts in New York where a guy gets a mysterious letter from his brother who disappeared years ago, and hints that he found gold. Thus begins an adventure of trying to leave NYC and travel to California either by land, sea, or taking a shortcut by hiking through Panama. Adventure games with multiple paths like this were pretty rare, so that was a nice way to get some reply out of a genre that didn't usually offer much. It was also pretty damned hard. It was made by some different developers than most of the games Sierra put out, so as a result the puzzles felt different than anything they can come up with before. As a result, you had to think differently and the usual tricks to figuring out a puzzle weren't much help. But the game also dropped hints at a pretty generous rate, if you were smart enough to recognize they were hints, and once you figured that out, it made for a good time.

Perhaps most importantly Gold Rush! helped me get an A on a report in 10th grade. I can't really say how accurate the history was in the game, but it came with a small book from some local northern California historical society. Between the game and that 40 page tourist book, I wrote up a paper about the California Gold Rush. It was pretty easy to write up, and also taught me that often times teachers will give you an A if everything sounds right, because who the hell has time to fact check each student?