Zoombinis
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| The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Brøderbund Software |
| Publisher(s) | Brøderbund Software |
| Engine | Proprietary/Custom |
| Platform(s) | PC, Macintosh |
| Genre(s) | Educational game |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Media | CD-ROM |
| Input methods | Keyboard, Mouse |
Zoombinis are the main characters in a line of educational software created by TERC, and designed by Scot Osterweil and Chris Hancock. It was originally released by Brøderbund Software (now The Learning Company) in 1995. The series is aimed at children older than 8 years. Many Children with Autism also enjoy playing the game. Some educators consider the original to be one of the greatest educational computer games of all time[citation needed], and numerous awards are shared by the trilogy.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Original storyline
The original storyline of the series begins with the first game, Zoombinis: Logical Journey (originally called The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis when released by Brøderbund). As explained in its introduction, the Zoombinis are the peaceful and successful inhabitants of an island called Zoombini Isle (or Zoombini Island). One day their lives are interrupted by an evil race known as the Bloats, who offer to expand their businesses and improve their quality of life. The Zoombinis naively trust the Bloats, who soon take over the island and enslave the Zoombinis. The Zoombinis devise an escape route and set sail on a boat to find a new homeland (later called "Zoombiniville"). To complete the game, the player must transport 625 Zoombinis in groups of 16 through a total of 12 puzzles to Zoombiniville. Since The Learning Company purchased Brøderbund Software in 1998 they have created two more games (sequels to the original) known as Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue and Zoombinis: Island Odyssey, both with different storylines.
[edit] Gameplay
At the start of each game the player has the ability to choose a party of 16 random Zoombinis by selecting from five different types of eyes, noses, hair and feet. Each Zoombini has a different combination of each of these characteristics and only two Zoombinis can be the same. (Making the total number of possible Zoombinis as 1250, twice the number the player needs to rescue.) Each Zoombini has a name randomly chosen by the computer from its list of several thousand, though it can be swapped before its creation. This name remains with them for the entire game.
The party of Zoombinis then must pass through one "leg" of three puzzles before arriving at a resting place. There are four legs of the journey, but the player can choose between the second or third of these sets and only needs to pass through three to finish. These puzzles vary in play, but usually involve determining and then following rules regarding the characteristics of the Zoombinis, for example, sending Zoombinis with green noses down the first path and ones with differently coloured noses down the second. If the player makes a mistake while completing a puzzle, then either the Zoombini involved is then lost or not all Zoombinis may be able to pass through. Those that do not make it through a puzzle are sent to the previous rest checkpoint. A full party of 16 must be present at a checkpoint to continue, but a party that has lost some members may continue through its leg to the next rest area. The levels of difficulty applied to each puzzle are "not so easy," "oh, so hard," "very hard," and "very, very hard." Once three entire parties of 16 Zoombinis have passed through one leg of the journey, the puzzles between those resting camps increase one level in difficulty and cannot be reverted. The first time a leg is completed perfectly at a certain level of difficulty, a new building appears in Zoombiniville. A total of 16 may be built, as there are four legs and four levels. The puzzles get harder the more they are played. The puzzles are as follows:
Allergic Cliffs There are two bridges hanging over two cliffs supported by six wooden pegs. The zoombinis can only cross one of either bridges according to their characteristics, if the wrong bridge is selected the cliff has an allergic reaction and the zoombini will be sent tumbling back to the other side, and a peg will fly away. If all the pegs are knocked off, then the bridge will collapse and a party of zoombinis will be left stranded, unable to cross between the cliffs.
Stone Cold Caves The zoombinis arrive at a stone face divided into four caves, which can be accessed by one path each. Each path is guarded by two stone guardians, who will only let them pass according to their characteristics, if the wrong cave is selected the guardian will jump, sending the zoombini tumbling down the path to the bottom. If the player takes too long finding the right caves, the noise of the zoombinis tumbling causes a rockslide and the cave paths are sealed.
Pizza Pass The zoombinis arrive on a road guarded by three pizza trolls: Arno, Willa and Shyler (Willa and Shyler only appear as the difficulty of the puzzle increases along with more pizza and ice cream toppings). There is a pizza machine to the left which has options for different toppings for a pizza and ice cream. The player must create a pizza which unique toppings for each troll so the zoombinis can pass. The more incorrect pizzas, the trolls begin to throw the zoombinis away.
The zoombinis then can be stored in compartments to continue their journey later at the leg end Shelter Rock. The player is then given the opportunity to take a right or left path through the next leg if they have a full party.
Left Path ("Who's Bayou"):
Captain Cajun's Ferry Boat Captain Cajun will take the Zoombinis on his ferry boat, but only if they have a characteristic in common with the person they sit next to. When the puzzle difficulty increases then the seats become closer together, so each zoombini must have something in common with three other zoombinis.
Titanic Tattooed Toads The player must find a path on different shaped, patterned and colored lily pads for huge toads to ferry them across on their backs. Each toad has a shape on its back which corresponds to a lily pad (hence 'tattooed toads'). The same toad cannot be used more than twice nor will there be any toads that hop diagonally. If the player chooses a path which doesn’t have a continuing sequence of the shape, color or pattern on the toads back the toad will get stuck and the zoombini will be left in limbo on the lily pads and cannot continue. When the puzzle difficulty increases there are few or no paths to be found, but half formed ones, and a fairy is shown at the beginning of the puzzle changing the lily pads with a wand. The wand is left with the toads and the player must change the lily pads with the wand to make a path. Eventually, the wand's power runs out.
Stone Rise Similar to Captain Cajun's Ferry Boat, the zoombinis must stand on stone squares, but they must have something in common with their neighbor on the next stone to charge the stones. When the puzzle is complete the stones rise and the zoombinis can walk along the hillside. If some stones are not charged they will not rise and some Zoombinis will be left behind.
Right Path ("The Deep Dark Forest"):
Fleens! The Zoombinis meet their supposed cousins on a hillside. There are three fleens on a tree branch, which must be lured off by a zoombini which has identical characteristics to the fleen. The object of the game is to work out what characteristics the zoombini has compared to the fleen characteristics. When a fleen is lured by a zoombini, they chase around a tree and a zoombini escapes to a tree branch. The player has six attempts before zoombinis run out of room on the tree branch and fall off, to be chased away by fleens. If all three fleens on the tree branch are lured from it, the hive on the branch shakes and the remaining fleens disappear and are chased away by bees, forming a shape of either a pair of scissors, an arrow, a storm cloud, etc.
Didimension Hotel Oola is a musical raccoon who owns a Didimension hotel, zoombini sized compartments hollowed out of a tree. The player must place the Zoombinis in the compartments by characteristics (row by row, column by column etc), but if they are placed in the wrong compartment, then the doorstep will disappear and the Zoombini will fall, and cause five minutes to pass on the clock. The more mistakes made the quicker the time passes, and eventually all doorsteps disappear and the Zoombinis are left stranded.
Mudball Wall According to arrangement on a stone sequence, mudballs of different shapes or colors must be fired at the stone sequence with either one, two or three circles on it (representing Zoombinis) to catapult them over. If mud runs out then Zoombinis are left stranded.
The zoombinis can then be stored in compartments to continue their journey later at 'Shade Tree'.
The Lion's lair The Zoombinis must be placed on a track according to characteristic (nose color etc) on the wall if they are placed on the wrong part of the track, a peg holding a drawbridge up is lost, and if six errors are made then the drawbridge falls and the Zoombinis cannot continue. If all Zoombinis are placed correctly then a stone lion lifts his paw and they can continue along the track to their next puzzle.
Mirror Machine The player has to find the doppelganger to each Zoombini on a glass slide, to match a mirrored reflection. If this is done correctly then a glass pendulum is lifted and the Zoombini can jump a gap on a cart and pass. If it is done incorrectly then the pendulum is lowered and the Zoombini falls into a pit. As the puzzle difficulty gets harder, the Zoombinis reflection has to be matched by adding in extra glass slides.
Bubblewonder Abyss The final puzzle, the Zoombinis have to navigate a maze trapped inside a bubble, they have to be sent through the maze according to their characteristics or they can be sucked into a whirlpool which pops their protective bubble and they fall into the bottomless pit. If they are placed correctly they pass to the other side of the cavern. As the puzzle difficulty gets harder the Zoombinis can only navigate the maze by one 'bubble button' and the player must alternate so as to not lose Zoombinis, by changing arrow sequences to direct the Zoombinis in the maze.
The Zoombinis then reach Zoombiniton (in the Broderbund version, Zoombiniville in alt. version), and the more Zoombinis complete the journey, the more buildings erected in Zoombiniton, with plaques dedicated to each journey completed.
[edit] Storylines of new games
[edit] Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue
After the foundation of Zoombiniville, the Zoombinis find peace once more, until a group of them become trapped inside a cave seeking shelter from a storm. Eventually they meet up with strange creatures called Boolies who occupy a city known as Booliewood. As a result of the storm, the Boolies have been scattered across the land, and their leader, the Grand Boolie Boolie, has disappeared. The goal of the game is to recruit a total of 400 Boolies to Booliewood to resurrect the Grand Boolie Boolie.
In the final puzzle, the game uses the Boolie characters to teach how binary values are stored in computers, replicating up to four bits (a nibble) at a time. Only addition is shown, never any other operation.
Players have to try to change a series of boolean "Boolies" from random mood states (happy is 1 and sad is 0) into a pattern of all happy (1111) by adding integer values to the series. When they are all happy, they make their way to a ship that carries them to their promised land: Booliewood. After they've all made their way home, the grand Boolie Boolie returns and the game has been won.
Other puzzles in the game include multi-dimensional movement, rotation puzzles, and several deduction problems, as well as new versions of puzzles from the original.
The graphics have been upgraded in this game and the Zoombinis have a new appearance. There are three difficulty levels for each puzzle instead of four.
[edit] Zoombinis: Island Odyssey
In this game, the Zoombinis discover that they left the moths to die in their native land of Zoombini Isle. So they take a boat and travel to Zoombini Isle, which is now completely empty of the Bloats (who made the land barren and then moved on), and then must again complete different puzzles, such as growing berries and breeding butterflies, to eventually set off a chain reaction that will restore the entire ecosystem to its original glory. This is the first game to incorporate science in the puzzles, which include intersection of rates, decoding, astronomical time, Venn diagrams, and Punnett squares, as well as some reincarnations of puzzles from Logical Journey. The graphics have again changed, and the Zoombinis' features are no longer important to gameplay. Here, they are fully 3-D. To win the game, the Zoombinis must take care of the Zerbles, feed them, and then release them into the wild. Once the Zoombinis get all of the 224 Zerbles into the wild, the Zoombinis head back to Zoombiniville, and the game is won.
[edit] Creatures
The most important creatures in the series are of course the Zoombinis, but there are several other characters outlined below.
[edit] Bloats
The Bloats are the evil race featured at the start of the original Zoombini game and are the creatures that drive the Zoombinis from their homeland. Very little other information about them is known. All that is seen of them is a big, black, pirate-like body and two glowing green eyes.
[edit] Boolies
The Boolies are creatures from the Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue game who can either be happy or sad. Their name is derived from Boolean logic, a kind of logic that has two states that is used extensively inside computers.
[edit] Captain Cajun
This character can be found in the first game, He paddles in his wooden raft around the "Who's Bayou". He'll give Zoombinis a ride only if they have something in common with their neighbor when they sit down on his raft. If they sit down and have nothing in common, he'll stomp on buttons and pull levers that eject Zoombinis into the water or back onto the dock. He also gives occasional taunts and compliments to certain Zoombinis.
[edit] Fleens
The Fleens are, in many ways, similar to the Zoombinis, as they too also feature different noses, hair, eyes, and feet. However, they are portrayed as the "evil" parallel race of the Zoombinis. The Fleens are also rumored to be the Zoombinis' distant cousins, until their genetic code was messed up by a bad batch of hair mousse.
[edit] Norfs
The Norfs are creatures from the Zoombinis: Mountain Rescue game. Norfs either live or play under the snow, surfacing to get in the way of Zoombinis while they attempt to carefully snowboard a specific route on the mountain. They also pester the Zoombinis to give them exactly what they want for lunch out of a selection of fish, sandwiches, salads, milk, orange juice, tea, ice cream, watermelon, and pie. They highly resemble a Tree stump, and look similar to Arno (Who is a very strict pizza troll) who appeared in the 3rd Zoombinis game.
[edit] Oola
Oola is a squirrel-like raccoon that runs a hotel in the "Deep Dark Forest". From time to time she often practices with her absent music companion "Charlie"
[edit] Pizza Trolls
Arno, Willa and Shyler are the three pizza trolls that appear to resemble tree stumps. They will let the Zoombinis pass if they can correctly make a different pizza for each of the trolls. Once a Zoombini makes a pizza, a troll will either reject it or accept it, commanding the Zoombini to add more toppings until they make the precise pizza. When the level of difficulty rises, more pizza toppings and trolls are introduced. Arno is the stumpy, ill-tempered one, Willa, the tall, thin, gaudy type and Shyler is the portly one who seems very patient at first, Shyler can quickly turn zany if his pizza isn't made correctly in four or five tries.
[edit] Zerbles
Zerbles are orange lizard-like creatures that appear in Zoombinis Island Odyssey. Like the Zoombinis, They can have different parts of the body. For feet, They can either have Legs, Wheels, or skis. For a tail, They can either have a curly tail, an umbrella, or a propeller. In Zoombinis island odyssey, More than 220 Zerbles had to be released into the wild. Their Favourite foods are Snozzleberries. Each Zerble likes at least two different kinds of Snozzleberry.
[edit] Moths
Moths appear in Zoombinis:island Odyssey. They needed help from the Zoombinis to transform from caterpillars to moths. They had to be fed the leaves of the Tum-Tum trees and then they formed their cocoons and had to come out to become moths to polinate the Snozzleberries.
[edit] Differences between Brøderbund and TLC games
The main differences between the versions of Zoombinis: Logical Journey released by both Brøderbund Software and The Learning Company are the way they are written and not the gameplay itself. The Brøderbund game is built with QuickTime[citation needed] and was designed to run on Classic Mac OS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 (however it still works perfectly with all later versions of Windows, excluding the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, which lacks a 16-bit compatibility layer.).[citation needed] Windows versions released by The Learning Company are built with DirectX and therefore do not run on Windows 3.1 at all. Macintosh versions by TLC support both Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X.
[edit] System requirements of TLC version
[edit] PC
- Operating system: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP, Windows Vista
- Processor: Intel Pentium 166 MHz and faster
- RAM: 32 MB or more
- Hard disk space: 40 MB or more (not including 7 MB for Adobe Acrobat Reader)
- Video card: 16-bit video card
- Sound card: Windows-compatible sound card
- Speakers
[edit] Macintosh
- Operating system: Mac OS 8.6 and later, Mac OS X (including 10.4 (Tiger) [1])
- Processor: PowerPC 180 MHz and faster
- RAM: 32 MB or more
- Hard disk space: 40 MB or more (not including 7 MB for Adobe Acrobat Reader)
- Video card: 16-bit video card
- Speakers
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