Word Fun (Intellivision, 1980)
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Word Fun (Intellivision, 1980)
Hey, did anyone else notice the complete revamping of intellivisiongames.com? They've had the same site up for years and its always looked circa 1999-2001 design style, but now they've got something that looks like it's database driven. Well, good for them.
I actually have a Word Fun cart, purchased in Tulsa, Oklahoma for $5 in 2006. It wasn't until I plugged it into my Intellivision II in August of 2008 that I found this sucker doesn't work with Intellivision II. For my purposes, I was suddenly happy I had purchased Intellivision Lives! for the Playstation 2. This marks the first Chronogaming title that I had to resort to playing on modern hardware!
Word Fun is one of two education titles that used the Electric Company name. If you remember The Electric Company, you'll remember that it was the quirky, off-the-wall, directed-at-a-slightly-older-audience, half-sibling of Sesame Street. It only ran new episodes from 1971 to 1977 and thereafter was in reruns until going off the air in 1985. (according to Wikipedia) So, in an odd way, Word Fun and its companion cart, Math Fun were like the very, very last episodes of The Electric Company, and done entirely without Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman or Rita ("Heeey yoooou guyyyyys!") Moreno.
Word Fun epitomizes a tradition of education games on home console systems: instead of having one, really good game that's fun and educational, it has multiple games that are educational.
Word Fun is: Crosswords, Word Hunt and Word Rockets.
Crosswords is an electronic Scrabble. Each player is given a rack of letters from which they assemble words. The object is to earn the most number of points while taking turns putting words in a grid so that they intersect with the words already placed. If you've played Scrabble or ever filled in a crossword puzzle you know what I'm talking about. The interesting feature of this is that you can't end your turn until your opponent approves the word! This encourages kids to come up with fake words and bullshit their opponent into believing they're legitimate. This is a valuable skill and I approve of it being cultivated. However, Crosswords is one of those games I like better in the real world as Scrabble. Also, Scrabble has those word trays that are handy to use as iPod Touch stands.
Word Hunt puts each player in control of a monkey that they each send out to capture letters. A player uses the letters to build up to three words in a time-limited round. There's also the option of sabotage. A player lacking in ruth (ruthless) can send his monkey out to simply deprive the enemy of much needed letters.
"Ha ha ha! You wish to spell the word 'fish'? Try doing it with out this 'h', you fool, as I deprive you of it to spell 'hate'!"
There is even the option of tossing a letter away if you aren't going to use it yourself, but still wish to deprive your bitter, word-building, jungle rival!
The longer your words, the better your score and, like the game Crosswords your opponent has final say on what constitutes a legitimate word. ("Hayt" is a real word, it's the name of Duncan Idaho's ghola in Dune Messiah! What do you mean you've never read it? You're already 10 years old!)
Aside: Word Hunt seems to have the uncanny ability to actively anticipate and attempt to prevent the players from spelling naughty words. No matter how hard we tried we were unable to find the necessary letters to spell something offensive. This was disappointing and we don't know if it was a feature in the game or a failure of ourselves.
Word Rockets was fun in a "this reminds me of playing Space Invaders in the arcade only without the sheilds, aliens or cannon" way. A word with a missing letter in it sails across the screen and you must fire at it with one of the letters available from your arsenal to complete it. F*g can become fog, or fig! This is about as much fun as it sounds but it is the only single player game on the cart, so it was the only one I was able to play without having to pay my son in gil. (yes, now he accepts imaginary, online currency as payment for playing old games with me.) Anyway, it added some much needed videogame action to the cart, and was probably what the average four or five years old of the era would've enjoyed most.
Next time, we play NHL Hockey, continuing my slow but inevitable grind through the well documented sports titles of Intellivision's debut year. 25092
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