Quirky App Of The Day: So Long, Oregon!
by Kathryn Zane
April 25, 2011
Under the advice of Mike, who commented on my review about The Oregon Trail, I tried the game So Long, Oregon! It's a spoof off of The Oregon Trail, down to the horrible graphics and funky music.
The game is done arcade style, turning the phone on its side and using the arrows at other sides of the screen. Players also tap the screen to shoot bullets to kill animals and can shake the screen to make the wagon jump. However, this tends to make game characters faint, break bones, or just die.
There are some fun tweaks to this game that make it original. The premise of the game is to get to the city of El Dorado. Just like The Oregon Trail, this game has the option to buy bullets or food at general stores. However, this decision is made as you're speeding past the store at break-neck speeds You also don't get to pick both. It's one or the other. Forts offer the chance to rest or get healed. Considering that most of my party members are being held together by duct tape by the time I get to a fort, I usually go for the heal.
I gotta be honest, I haven't managed to beat the game yet. There. I said it. I went there. This isn't your average game of poking along in a linear fashion. No, this game sends you sky-rocketing over the mountain terrain that I thought was the background. You can even get stuck between them if you don't go fast enough. Not because the slope is too steep. No, it's because your wagon and ox has done a 720-backflip and ended up up-side-down and wedged between two grassy hills of death. This leads you to shaking your phone which sets you upright. However, as previously mentioned, this results is broken bones, fainting, and, most commonly in my case, death.
Rivers are no longer things that you have to decide whether to cross by ferry or ford. They're something to get the heck out of as fast as you can. Dysentery and cholera await you for treading through, and death by drowning will come for sitting too long. It's best to just use a previous mountain to launch over it.
When a character dies, a gravestone is shot off the back of the wagon and laid to rest. I even managed to get one stuck between two of those previously mentioned lovely hills of destruction.
So Long Oregon is available at iTunes for $1.99
