I don't have any memory of playing Oregon Trail at school. I played it at home, through Oregon Trail 2, and I never made it out alive. Oregon Trail 2 is, in every way I can think of, an improvement on Oregon Trail 1, a game that had already been extremely solid since its earliest iteration.
It's a game with a learning curve, because very few players are going to intuit that they can get meat on the road but not fruit or veg, and that it matters. In booting up the game for the first time in many years I made the mistake of thinking that all I needed for hunting was some bullets and a rifle. As it happens, you need gunpowder too, and lots of it. In earlier incarnations, such blunders would probably leave you with no real recourse. In Oregon Trail 2 it leaves you trading away winter coats in the middle of July in a dust storm.
It's a game with a learning curve, because very few players are going to intuit that they can get meat on the road but not fruit or veg, and that it matters. In booting up the game for the first time in many years I made the mistake of thinking that all I needed for hunting was some bullets and a rifle. As it happens, you need gunpowder too, and lots of it. In earlier incarnations, such blunders would probably leave you with no real recourse. In Oregon Trail 2 it leaves you trading away winter coats in the middle of July in a dust storm.