While the glory days of gaming edutainment are now over, we’ll always look back on games like MindMaze with fond memories. Revisiting MindMaze surfaced great memories of gaming away on an old Shuttle PC with insulation strapped to both sides by zipties. Still, both games are incredibly fun relics from an era of gaming that’s long since passed us by. Abstract: The Microsoft Encarta Multimedia Encyclopedia offers information on more than 25,000 topics through a variety of media and access paths. It really leans into the 90s action-fantasy video game genre and reminds me a lot of classic PC games like King’s Quest. The ’95 version is smoother and more detailed, but lacks the flair and personality of its predecessor. Both the ’94 and ’95 versions rock unique retro aesthetics that hold up well in 2020.Įncarta ’95 was far more polished than the grainy, Windows 3.1-pixellated style of ’94, but there’s still something very charming about the earlier version. Users of Encarta 98 Encyclopedia may subscribe to monthly online updates of Web Links and Encarta Yearbook for 19.95 for 18 installments.

It's an educational and puzzle game, set in a game show / trivia / quiz, geography, history, fantasy, religion, science and sociology themes, and was also released on Windows 3.x. Maybe the internet’s rotted my brain over the years.īeyond the gameplay itself, the thing about MindMaze is how cool it looks. Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia and Encarta 98 Encyclopedia Deluxe Edition for the Microsoft Windows operating system are available for estimated retail prices of 54.95 and 79.95, respectively. Microsoft Encarta (Included game) (aka MindMaze) is a video game published in 2006 on Windows by Microsoft Corporation. Are the properties of lichen common knowledge? Or the exact nature of the Lanthanide Series? Kids in the 90s clearly had a more robust attention span than I do, or were much cleverer. Whether they could survive the experience was another matter.Įven as an adult, some of the offered questions stumped me. Questions ranged from simple science like heat transfer and electronics to puzzles tackling metallurgy and industrial safety.

Getting through every level was a genuinely enormous task as a kid. It’s very important you know one of the main characters in Encarta 1994 is a bear wearing khaki.

Microsoft encarta encyclopedia