The Amazon Trail

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The Amazon Trail is a rather strange computer spin-off of The Oregon Trail. Your basic concept is to collect tokens on a medallion by doing tasks told to you by a jaguar spirit while traveling through time. In between, you take hundreds of photographs of local wildlife. It's about as weird as it sounds, although still pretty enjoyable. Although the fishing just isn't as fun as gunning down buffalo.

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Tropes used in The Amazon Trail include:

• An Aesop: Comes with every token you earn for your convenience.
• But Thou Must!: If you don't help the locals in their quest, the Jaguar will scold you, you won't earn your badge and you'll be started over on that leg of the journey.
• Dialogue Tree
• Edutainment Game
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Averted somewhat surprisingly considering it's made by the makers of Oregon Trail. It's really hard to die in this game.
  • With the exception of the random drowning result from capsizing your boat. Instant death.
• Fishing Minigame: It makes sense, since you're on a boat in a river. It's your main source of food.
• Freemium: A free trial version, with fewer options (for example, only two choices of guide instead of four), was released on CD-ROM and distributed with certain packages of breakfast cereal.
• Get On With It Already: To earn a token, you have to listen to a shaman tell a long-winded story about a tapir that you can't exit from which takes like 10 minutes to end.
• Gotta Catch Em All: You're encouraged to take photographs of the dozens (if not hundreds) of plants and animals in the rain forest or river.
• Green Aesop: The driving force behind the whole game.
• Kick the Son of a Bitch: Sure, it might be a tad cruel to trick that conquistador into consuming your medicine that induces uncontrolled vomiting (or better, insanity)...but come on, dude's a conquistador, and he steals whatever you try to trade him, besides.
  • You have to give him your sickness-inducing medicine if you want One Hundred Percent Completion.
  • On the contrary, players who are familiar with the history of the conquest of the Americas will have less of a hard time with the moral dissonance.

"So long, sucker!!"

• Lost Forever: You can catch a pirarucu, a fish that's as long as a bus. It only swims by once, but it takes up half the screen and if you don't catch it, that's your problem.
• No Indoor Voice: Some of the locals.
• The Slacker: If you choose the guide who's a man for your journey "You can fish, I think I'll just take a nap"
• Time Travel: Throw in a lost Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, a wily pirarucu, some hunger-crazed pirates, and a greedy oil tycoon throughout several centuries...
• Vomit Discretion Shot: You can tell that the crazed conquistador is throwing up, but they don't show it on the screen.
• What Year Is This?: Answered by the locals.
  • Interestingly, it's phrased "what is today's date" in the Dialogue Tree, but everyone always knows to specify the year.
    • Even more bizarre is one stop where one person you talk to says it is the rainy season while another is experiencing the dry season. Usually everyone at a particular location is from the same time.