Mega Math

Math on a computer — that sounded like work in the mid-nineties. Mega Math sees it differently. Here, the goal isn't to learn derivatives or integrals, but to click numbers under time pressure and keep your nerves steady before the clock runs out and you're left sitting there with an empty brain.

It's a reflex-based math game on PC where you face problems and must select the correct answers from multiple choice options. The faster, the better. Nothing revolutionary — educational gaming mixed with fun in a nutshell. The problems increase in difficulty, and if you want to reach a better score, you need to be both careful and quick. The atmosphere is spartan: simple sprite graphics, basic sounds, no feedback on what just happened, just digits and time.

The problem is that playing gets boring after five minutes. Basic addition and subtraction are tedious even with time pressure, and when you reach multiplication and division, you start wondering why you didn't just open a calculator. The core mechanic — speed plus accuracy — works, but the actual content is too uninteresting to keep you at the screen. Old educational games often believed that the challenge alone was enough. That's not the case here.

Mega Math is an artifact from an era when people believed you could attract kids to math with a simple game devoid of story and character. Today, even a nine-year-old would laugh at it. What remains is a feeling — a retro game without aesthetics, without reason to exist outside a classroom at the end of the '90s.

If you want to see what an attempt at a math game looked like back then, running it in your browser is no problem. You'll remember that you actually had fifty-year-old hardware and you were grateful for it. But it offers little else. It's neither difficult enough, nor fun enough, nor interesting enough to warrant more than five minutes of curiosity.