Math Blaster Plus!

When your teacher sent you home with floppy disks, it was clear: either you learn to count, or you're done for. Math Blaster Plus! is exactly the kind of game your parents would load onto the computer when they decided your brain needed some education. And surprisingly, it works.

It's a platformer with an educational twist from the mid-eighties, trying to squeeze math lessons into an action-packed game world. You run left and right, jump across platforms, and instead of enemies killing you, you have to answer math problems correctly. A wrong answer costs you a life. A correct one lets you move forward. The key difference from other edutainment games is that here, doing math isn't just a boring menu — it's an integral part of the gameplay.

The controls are straightforward: arrow keys to move, spacebar to jump. On screen you see platforms, some collectibles, and most importantly, questions. The game's pace keeps things lively — you're constantly running somewhere, constantly concentrating. It's not a platforming masterpiece, but for educational software from 1987, it's surprisingly well-balanced. The graphics are primitive, the sounds unremarkable, but the atmosphere is exactly what you'd expect from a distance-learning educational computer software from the nineties.

What do we remember about it? The fact that it was less boring than a paper workbook. It wasn't exactly a revolution in edutainment — hundreds of similar games came and went — but it held up for its time. It's aged like all eighties games: the graphics are artifacts, but the game logic still stands.

Today you'd play it mostly for nostalgia or curiosity about what computers looked like when they were still trying to be smart. A browser-based emulator handles it without any trouble. It's not a miracle, but it's not a waste of time either — and that's a decent recommendation for educational software.