The Games I've Played #4

Learning With Leaper is an educational game for the ColecoVision. My sister and I used to play it several times, and at one poin I really didn't like the game.



LWL gives you four different games to play. You choose them by moving Leaper around. Leaper is some kind of olive with legs and horns. It bounces as it moves. It's kind of a weird mascot, but I think he appeared in one other Sierra game. Anyway, the choices are paint, counting, running through a maze, and compare and contrast.



We'll start off with the maze, cause there isn't much to say. You're a frog, and there's a caterpillar. There's no time limit, and the caterpillar doesn't do much besides wonder around aimlessly. If you let him catch up to you, he'll just turn back around. The frog moves slowly and the game seems to be aimed for really young children. There are much more complicated mazes than this, but not many dead-ends.



Another game that's aimed for the really young is this counting game. You have to select the correct number of bones for the dogs. It's a cute game where the dogs will either wag their tails or bark at you. The game last till ten tries unless you make mistakes. I used to enjoy just waiting until all the dogs showed up and I would only give a bone to one of them.




Probably the only game that older kids would appreciate is the compare and contrast game. You play as an balloon with a hook and you match up crates with the crate on the top right. It starts out easy with letters, moves on to shapes, words, and eventually hard-to-tell shapes. My sister used to play this a lot, and I eventually began to dislike this game because I was a selfish kid who wants to play games a lot. Totally different from today.



The last game was paint. My sister liked this game even more. Here you pick a color and click anywhere on screen to fill in the space. You can't undo anything, which sucks. There are four pictures, which you wouldn't know unless you accidently pushed the 3 button. We must have painted this house several times before we knew there were more options. Observe.










My sister like the fourth picture, naturally. I liked either 2 or three, mostly because I was already bored with the house. The odd this about this game was that there were clear spaces for you to fill in, but for some reason the paint program wouldn't fill them in all the way. For example:



This one wasn't so bad because I liked to make the sky black and the other side yellow to make it look like night.


So that's what the Leaper taught us young kids. That and patience. Lots of patience. What I left out is the fact that after you're done with a game, you see the opening screen again, and have to watch the Leaper slowly jump around again. And you have to watch the menu screen again even if you just want to play the next level of the maze or balloon game.

I wonder if anybody who worked on this game remembers the horny* olive with legs. Isn't Sierra still around**? It would be interesting if someone brought back one of the weirder educational game characters.




* - Not that kind of horny!
** - Nope. It was bought up by Vivendi at some poin but they kept the name.