Odell Lake was
MECC's attempt to make a science/biology themed game to go along with
Oregon Trail and
Number Munchers for the
Apple II.
After choosing a fish (or having one selected randomly, depending on how the game was configured by the teacher/owner), the game sticks you into a series of simplified RPG-style
random battles with another random species of fish. The game presents you with three options for each encounter:
RUN AWAY, EAT, and WAIT. The basic strategy is to RUN AWAY if the opponent is bigger than you are, EAT if the opponent is smaller, or WAIT if your opponent is around the same size. If you eat a smaller fish, there's about a 30% chance that the game will decide the smaller fish was
TOXIC** and cause you to lose a crapload of energy. Occasionally you'll also find
plankton (the staple food of the smaller fish species) and worms, which have about a 60% chance of being fishing bait - You lose instantly if you select EAT - or the worst of all Odell Lake encounters, the
FLOATING BLACK OIL BLOB OF DEATH, which can randomly kill you even if you try to escape. The cycle of encounters loops endlessly until you run out of energy/get eaten/eat bait/get hit by the OIL BLOB OF DEATH, then, depending on how long you lasted, you might go to the scoreboard where invariably someone would have a score at least 20000 points higher than yours. Simple game, but a hell of a lot of fun for something supposedly educational.
There is an updated
power mac/
windows 95 version, but it's nowhere near as fun and lasting as this one, at least in my opinion. It's available as of this writing here, and by the looks of the page it's going to be available for quite some time :
http://www.cdromshop.com/cdshop/desc/p.772040748166.html
**Okay, okay, so it wasn't random, it was just the horrible blurry daycare IIe monitor. Still, it seemed random..