So for some reason in the mid 90s Davidson decided to hit the reboot button on the Math Blaster Franchise and release newer versions of what they had already made. Why? Because Davidson was acquired by Knowledge Adventure (better known as JumpStart) and they wanted to get sales to kick in (I’m not exactly sure, I’m not getting alot of information about all this)

Gameplay and Story: This is essentially a loose remake of Math Blaster in Search of Spot, and it comes with a new villain (because in the opening cut scene we can see In Search of Spot’s villain the Trash Alien in Jail with Illitera and….whoever that robot is……hey how come Illitera was the only math blaster villain to make it into the Blasters Universe tv series?*one google later* I checked the wiki apparently Dr.Dabble made it in but I could swear that Major History was the villain in the lost weekend episode. But then again I might as well ask why was Spot not in it but I remembered this was a prequel series) who’s our big bad? Some disgusting thing that calls itself a Gelator abducts Spot just as he’s taunting the villains locked up in the prison planet Lockemup, and he only wants Spot for his knowledge, yeah Gelator is a pretty dumb villain, so there’s more stakes to this one, because Gelator could head towards the Headquarters. Oh and by the way Galactic Commander is in the front lines this time, however we only get her for one game and it’s the new version of the number recycling game, Blasternaut has to go to the Planet Moldar to recover the crystals that power the planet and weaken Gelator (not to mention clean up the mess Gelator made)

Graphics: They’re about the same as the original (actually no they’re not you can tell it’s a different team that worked on this) however they found money for mouth animation as it were since at least here we see Blasternaut’s mouth move

Soundtrack: well this time we have background music (the original one didn’t have background music) however I haven’t played enough to give an accurate analysis of it

Addictive: I haven’t played this game enough times yet to call this addictive however I had decided to make this game the morning gaming video since I had no ideas and didn’t want to do those YDKJ marathons again (especially since I have no other reason to play YDKJ the Ride now except for catching the custom intros on certain holidays) also I want to say that yes this game does include a printable certificate, and at least this time it doesn’t have a Y2K bug

Depth: We do have the same number of activities in this game as the original, however there are two versions of the zapper game, it’s not called Trash Zapper in this game (Trash Alien isn’t the bad guy in this remember?) we have to do Space Zapper twice in this game (one where we have to type in the answers in order to power up the zapper and zap asteroids and whatever those satellites are, and in the second one at the end of the game we zap the answers that has these atoms on it), and they added this extra activity to Math Blaster where we get the key and dodge Gelator’s troll army. There are three different endings to this game, plus one from where if you are unable to rescue Spot (I have yet to unlock the other two good endings) and they expect you to hit 85% mastery. Sadly the Cave Runner activity is really reduced here, because we don’t fly like we used to, we don’t have the extra treasure chest activity however we do collect the stuff to take down the creatures that are in our way. Even though there is a done button that flashes in the number recycler game in a recent playing (before I typed up this review) I did opt to use what was left over to boost my score, and even better they have an option where you can get a new puzzle in this recycler game rather than keep struggling with the same puzzle over and over again (but the equal signs and the other signs switch places still which is kind of frustrating), and yet at the same time this game still feels stupid short (unless you play a hard mission everything in the Cave Runner activity is a little bit expanded)

Difficulty: There are multiple units I can play, however it’s just Easy, Medium, Difficult in this one plus levels 1-6, I will admit the extra activity attached to the Math Blaster activity is a little bit challenging because the jump function won’t exactly co-operate when we have to collect the key and gems in a certain activity. This game is kind of frustrating to play also like I said I have yet to unlock the other two endings

Post review follow-up: You want to know something that kind of made me mad? I actually found this game second hand, on the day of the 25th owniversary special of me owning a computer (Math Blaster in Search of Spot was the first game I owned that’s why I used Math Blaster games in it) Here’s the original intended playing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3bAKcuJME4

And here the updated version I had to do over again because I found this game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl0ouJFfQgs

Don’t worry I will review the other two games included in the videos eventually in fact it’s part of the gaming season (I kind of have to include them because I plan on finishing off the Muncher games and I’m burning off Spellbound because it’s its 25th owniversary anyway) overall this game is fine for what it is I just don’t think a remake was necessary, maybe if it were a tie in to the tv series (heck I would have played a game with Blaster and GC and MEL but Blaster’s Universe didn’t take off plus CBS Saturday Mornings kept getting screwed over)

It seems like when other organizations purchased The Learning Company and Davidson the quality of the games went down hill. I know with the learning company Mattel purchased them. The games that came out was rubbish and not near as good as the originals. A year later they where gone.

I short of remember Math Blaster I think I might have played one or two of those games, but I'm not really sure.

tornadocam: I'm actually sorry that Mattel didn't really do anything with the merger because I can only think of the Cluefinders toy line that could have been

classgame:

I think Mattel just purchased and merged with the Learning Company just so they could say they had an education division. After all Hasbro and other toy makers had gotten into the educational computer games. Also there was lots of greed as well. When Mattel merged with the Learning Company it made them one of the largest makers in not just toys but computer games as well. After the merger Mattel's value went into the billions.

The problem was Mattel was over their head and did nothing with the Learning Company. Why they kept the Learning Company's co-founders and board they let a lot of employees from the Learning Company go. This lead to the Learning Companies co-founders and board to quit. Thus, Mattel was stuck with a product they did nothing with. Mattel lost hundreds of millions by not doing nothing with their new purchase. They closed that part of Mattel down.

tornadocam: again they could have expanded them with a toy line, it's almost as bad as when Disney bought DiC and didn't do alot with it (like the only one of Dic's pre-existing IP's they used was Inspector Gadget and they did more stuff with him than with the other stuff)