Flag Capture is Minesweeper before Minesweeper except everybody hated it. You have a grid of squares and have to find the flag behind them without triggering a bomb, you do this by using the numerical and directional clues the game occasionally gives you. It was notable to reviewers at the time for having bad graphics and terrible sound which, hah, I mean okay I guess they had to draw the line somewhere. Reviewers back then must have had a hard time padding out what they had to say about these games too, solidarity with them from 40 years in the future.

When I was a junior in high school I failed Algebra II thanks to one of the rare truly awful teachers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also math dumb, but until that point I’d gotten through solely because I’m the exact kind of smug underachiever teachers loved to give extra time to in order to unlock my potential or whatever, but this teacher was more content with just drawing the numbers on the white board and telling you to figure it out, none of that pesky teaching shit from them! So I failed Algebra II and had to retake it my senior year, no big deal right? Wrong, because in my state you had to complete three math credits to be eligible to graduate during the Lionel-Hutz-business-card-esque "No, Child Left Behind!" era. And since nobody in the office would believe me that this teacher was awful, I would be stuck with her for Algebra II, would inevitably fail, and would be forced to repeat and miss out on the dizzying excitement of community college.

The way I solved this problem was first trying to take pre-algebra, which lasted one class before the teacher realized she had me for geometry two years before which means I had to have passed Algebra I which means I couldn’t take Pre-Algebra. It was in the rules. But what I found wasn’t in the rules was that someone who already passed mainstream math classes couldn’t drop down into Basic Math, the remedial course. So thats what I did over the protestations of the school administration. Then, over the course of the year, what started off as a class of five ‘troubled’ sophomore kids and me, a troubled senior kid that wasn’t classified as such probably because I’m 'suburban' or at least good at manipulating authority figures, ballooned to include ten other seniors who didn’t want to risk being held back. The school finally noticed, and while I heard they closed that loophole for the next year, they also let the teacher go before they met tenure.

What does me pied pipering a bunch of schoolmates into a basic math course and getting a teacher canned right before an economic recession because I didn’t want to have to apply myself have to do with the Atari game Basic Math? Pretty much fucking nothing, I just wanted to go off on a tangent because I’m already regretting this ‘try and talk about every video game ever made’ gimmick. What the hell are you supposed to say about some of these early titles? Its a game where you do math. You solve equations against a solid colored background and get a beep sometimes. It might be the first uh math game? I’m not bothering looking that up. For the record, people thought this sucked contemporarily too which is hilarious because there were only three video games then.