Let's Play Logical Journey of the Zoombinis

Noyb's picture

So, a few months ago I woke up in the middle of the night struck with a flash of inspiration. I booted up my laptop, created a new text file "gametitles.txt" and went back to sleep. In the morning, I opened the text file. There was a single entry: "The Illogical Journey of the Zambonis." I want to make this title into an actual trainwreck sometime in the future. A takeoff on The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, except all of the logic puzzles are actually independent random events with no logical connections between moves.

It's been ages since I've played The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, a kid's game based around teaching logic through colorful graphics and wacky characters. Most of the levels involve providing and input (mainly by choosing a zoombini and a path/bucket, where each Zoombini could have one of many different possible appearances that may or may not be important to the level), observing what happens, and intuiting the rules underlying that level's system.

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis isn't a trainwreck. What is a trainwreck is some kid's Let's Play of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. The only one I found when searching youtube for '"Let's Play" Zoombinis' when trying to refresh my hazy memory of this game.

I'm having trouble mentally articulating what I find so special about this Let's Play, but here goes. This is totally something I would have done had I access to a camera and YouTube when I was younger. He's a kid just trying to amuse himself, but brave enough to share it with the world. He's a kid who doesn't actually seem to enjoy the game, but soldiers on regardless, echoing all those times in my childhood where I would play what I had and try to make the best of it. He's a kid who makes the same lame jokes over and over again when prompted by the same stimulus. He's a kid who tends to fill awkward silences with random bursts of casual racism. The Let's Play itself is recorded by a hand-held video recorder, capturing all the ambient noises in his room. Ceiling lights reflect off the monitor. In an odd bit of synchronicity, the viewer is made complicit with the player's confusion in one level where this light obscures an important clue that the player himself doesn't notice for a few minutes.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzr0aTssK0s
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcq5ooJaQvY
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmsk5FRRLSI
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMVVhP8e77A
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTbHwWzKC94
etc.

Edit: This is becoming even more racist as I watch. "I love Italian people They make spaghetti and pizza and Mamma Mia! And they made Mario. Well, Japanese people did. Japanese people created an Italian person. What's the world coming to? Well, Japanese people made American people. You know, all of Earthbound. Yeah, I went there." -.-;