Fisher-Price - School Bus Driver

Fisher-Price's School Bus Driver isn't a game you'd find on the hot lists of nineties shooters. It's soft educational software for the littlest ones, which in itself doesn't work against quality. But that's precisely where the problem lies — hidden on the same diskette under the name of a famous toy is a boring programming exercise devoid of any soul.

It's a simple simulator: you drive a bus around a village, pick up kids, and take them to school. No complex objectives, no tricks. You move across the map literally like on a chessboard. The graphics are bitmap houses and loud scrawling text. The bus moves at approximately the speed of a dried-up snail. There's nothing here that would particularly entice you to persevere.

The controls are primitive, which might be okay for small kids, but even they would probably yawn here. There's no shortage of educational intent — counting children, familiarizing with the environment — but the execution is so fleeting that only those with nothing better to do will get anything out of it. The sounds are harsh, and the music is worn thin with repetition.

Historically, this is Fisher-Price's attempt to adapt its brand to home computers, which was a hot topic sometime in the mid-eighties. The result? An average that can't even complain, because nobody expected anything from it anyway. In the DOS games archive, it occupies a place more for collectors of curiosities.

Today? If you want to introduce kids to retrocomputing, grab The Learning Company or Math Blaster instead. Fisher-Price School Bus Driver is a textbook of sterility, not entertainment or education. You can play it if you enjoy collecting absurdities, but don't expect even ten minutes of fun.