I first played this game while I was in elementary school. This game easily fits within the genre of 'edutainment' along with the Oregon Trail, and Carmen Santiago series of games. Although it was clearly developed to teach kids about US Geography, it shines in many unique and novel ways and remains one of my favorite old games to play. The premise of the game is that a television set has gone amok and has infected people with something called the 'fuzz'.
I first played this game while I was in elementary school. This game easily fits within the genre of 'edutainment' along with the Oregon Trail, and Carmen Santiago series of games. Although it was clearly developed to teach kids about US Geography, it shines in many unique and novel ways and remains one of my favorite old games to play. The premise of the game is that a television set has gone amok and has infected people with something called the 'fuzz'. The fuzz is an infection which turns normal citizens of the US (depicted in the game as black hats w/ legs) into blobs of white noise. Your character's avatar is depicted as a white hat with legs.
The general gameplay is
action oriented. You buy tickets to other cities via a train system. The source of the corruption is somewhere in the US. You begin the game with 10 crystals that give you some protection from being 'fuzzed' yourself. Everytime a fuzzed individual bumps into you, you lose 1/2 of your crystals. You can, however, drop a crystal in the path of a fuzzed citizen and it will instantly revert them to normal. This causes a LOT of dodging as you frantincally drop crystals while avoiding 5-10 fuzzed pursuers. Clearing an infested city takes time and work. Your ultimate objective is to obtain 100 crystals, find the source of the infection and touch the source while holding 100 crystals. Your character obtains new crystals by dropping them on the ground and waiting for them to spawn more crystals. This is a bit challenging since anytime you drop a crystal, normal citizens will run for them to pick them up. This means that to spawn crystals, you essentially have to guard them by pushing citizens away. You can intentionally allow citizen to get crystals since they too will be protected from the 'fuzz' when they have them in their possession. Having to balance the need for keeping crystals, growing crystals, and using crystals to 'unfuzz' citizens makes the game a unique challenge. Multiple difficulty settings also increase the replayability and challenge of the game.
Detractors and annoyances of the game are largely due to the ticket purchasing system which requires you to type the entire long form name of each city and state the you wish to purchase a ticket to. While you are typing this, the clock for the train schedule is still counting down and sometimes if you are in an especially infested city, you need to leave sooner rather than later.
Overall, I would say that this is an especially good classic game and is probably most aptly summarized as a combination of "Where in the World is Carmen Santiago" and "Pong". Although this may seem a bizzare combination, it is integrated flawlessly.
