- Publisher: Didatech
- Developers: Dave Vincent and Jimfre Bacal
- Genre: Edutainment
- Released: 1991
Crosscountry Canada was the best game ever. Sure, other games from 1991 had 256 colours instead of 4, Midi music instead of PC speaker beeps and mouse controls instead of text parser input, but Crosscountry Canada could do something that no other game at the time could do.
Crosscrountry Canada could get you an entire class period of goofing off on the computer, instead of doing work.
The basic premise of Crosscountry Canada is that you are truck driver picking up goods and delivering them across Canada. Along the way you learn about Canada’s geography and different industries. The only problem was that my school didn’t have a copy of the sheet that told you which cities had which commodities, so we were left to drive our trucks around aimlessly totally unable to win the game.
The the game also had some seedier elements to it. You could choose to speed or pick up hitchhikers, if you wanted to. If you did either of these bad things the only reprecussion was that you’d get a ticket or the hitchhiker would rob you. You seem to have unlimited funds in the game and, most of the time, the hitchhiker would actually reward you with money for driving them around. The lesson to children is that speeding and picking up hitchhikers is fun and profitable.
There were legends that you run over the hitchhiker or he could murder you, but I’ve never actually seen it for myself. Kids thought that you could enter in any command and the game would do it for you, but they were wrong.
A thing that bugs me about this game is that it seriously is spelled “Crosscounty” in the title. How a supposedly educational game could make it to market spelling “Cross Country” all as one word is beyond me.
On the mystical commodities location sheet: I suspect that they didn’t have the locations listed in-game as a form of copy protection. If you didn’t have the manual, you couldn’t beat the game. I also suspect that almost no schools actually bought a legitimate copy of Crosscountry Canada. They copied those floppies. So, if you want to know why Canada has such a “piracy” culture, know that it’s cultivated in our nation’s school computer labs.
