Games I Grew Up On: Midnight Rescue!

Another game I would play in the computer lab after school in elementary school was the first of the Super Solver series of games, Midnight Rescue!  Morty Maxwell has threatened to make a school disappear at midnight and he is hiding in one of the robots patrolling the campus.  It is your job to figure out through deduction and clues you find which robot he's hiding in.

You can get these clues by answering questions (generally reading comprehension questions) found around the school.  The patrolling robots occasionally pop up and you must take pictures of them to get details about them to use with the clues to figure out which robot Morty is hiding in.  If the robots touch the player or their projectiles (some throw pies) hit the player, you will lose some time.  If it reaches midnight without Morty being found, the player will be painted invisible along with the school and lose the game.

If you successfully figure out which robot Morty is hiding in, your lifetime score will increase based on how quickly you solve this, how much film you have left, and how many reading comprehension questions were answered.  The higher your lifetime score, the harder the game will get.  I think this is a wonderful way to increase difficulty dynamically and based on player skill.  It does require playing the game over and over again, but that is kind of the purpose of educational games and the game itself was fun enough as a kid that that was not a problem.  I believe you can find this game as abandonware and can still play it using DOSBox and if you've got little munchkins in 3rd to 5th grade, I would highly recommend you get this for them.  It's useful for training critical thinking and reading comprehension in a fun and enjoyable way.