It’s 1995. I am sitting down at my dad's old PC (a Pentium 386, if my memory serves me) and looking through the list of games installed in the venerable old frame. What should I play? Cosmo's Cosmic adventures? DuckTales? Commander Keen? Why not BioMenace, or Blake Stone. That's when my mom comes by and suggests that I should play something more “Educational”
So I begin my search though the games I deem fun enough that are still within the realms of motherly definitions of educational gaming.
Where in the world is my Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego disc? I might try my hand at Treasure Mountain, but I played that a while ago and don’t want to repeat my adventures of the night before. Then my eyes, young and spoiled by the sights of a cruel world of non-gamers, fall across the icon for Nigel’s World. And I start to play.
Nigel’s World was a learning game in which the player aides an amateur photographer, the titular Nigel, in a timed quest to travel around the world and take photograhps of people, animals and locations, in a bid for the grand prize at a photography contest. The game is timed, with only a few weeks for traveling
before the contest begins, and there is an element of strategy as the player must choose between a more diverse portfolio of images or a more centralized shooting area.
Locations in the game vary from Saudi Arabia, to Canada, to Russia to the Australian outback, and the sights and sounds of each location are rendered in an endearingly cartoonish style, which might make some you think of Nickolodean's TV series the Wild Thornberry's. Nigel himself even bears a bit of a physical resemblance to Nigel Thornberry from that show, with a bristly mustache, pitt helmet and khacki shorts to boot. One wonders if the designers played this game when they were younger.
Nigel's Quest is also similar in it's play style to "Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego", and if you're a fan of that game you will probably enjoy this one. Those looking for a gunfight need not apply. The only violence in the game is if Nigel gets chased away by a lion whose snooze he interrupted. Geography or Photography buffs may or may not find humor in the games discriptions of the areas you explore in your quest for the perfect picture, and kids will love the chance to take thier own nature photos alongside the blustery companion of Nigel. At least I and my brothers did. And we're still game and photography buffs, so perhaps some of this game's lessons stayed with us after all these years. Anyway, play it and enjoy it, or let your kids take a shot at it. You could do worse.
4.5/5 stars.
