JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain Walkthrough (Robots 1-5)

Now here's something I haven't done yet -- a walkthrough of a JumpStart game! Personally, I remember very little of this series growing up; the only two games I played were Kindergarten (the classic one) and Reading for 1st Graders. So, why did I make this, exactly? I had been seeing various videos of this game across YouTube and was very intrigued by it. I came across a boxed copy of the game on eBay for a really good price as well. How could I resist?

This is going to be split up in five parts due to how obscenely long this game is. There was absolutely no chance I was ever going to be able to fit this entire game into one part anyway -- pretty sure the game runs above 12 hours anyway, which is the longest you are allowed to upload. This walkthrough was recorded off v1.1 of this game, which has a few sound-related alterations compared to v1.0 and is also the first to include the shortened opening (so, unfortunately, no mention of the extra credit question...for shame!). This was recorded off Windows 95 in DOSBox, as I wanted to have the OPL3 MIDI to set this apart from the other videos of this game on YouTube (they usually use Windows MIDI). I set all the games to the highest difficulty where it was applicable for not only the obvious reason of me being far above the target demographic, but also because the games give you a lot more invention points if you do so. Generally, if you play on Level 3 on all of the games, you never have to farm for more points. More on the games themselves (in order of when they were first played):

Painting Gallery: I have to wonder why they even bothered with this. There's almost no educational value to this game and you just have to follow Polly's stupidly easy instructions to win it.

Shrinking Room: People love to complain how "slow" this game is…umm, the difficulties aren't just there to look pretty! Seriously, set it to Level 3, and this game gets infinitely more tolerable. I like this one alright, though the last level design you see in this video drives me bonkers -- I had to cut down most of it because almost all of it was spent just trying to get Botley into the stupid portal. Also, you can tell they didn't anticipate people setting it to level 3 -- the glitchiness really starts to shine. Still, I really enjoy this one. I have a few dumb moments in this video, but I think it went alright.

Biosphere: I'm going to let you know now I'm not very intelligent when it comes to Earth science, so don't expect me to get everything on my first try. Also, if you're wondering how I signal for help on the biomes being correct or not, you can press the space bar and the game will basically outright tell you if you're in the right place or not. They frustratingly never tell you this unless you press the help button while you're in the biomes, which is annoying as I would have liked to have known it a lot earlier.

Observatory: This one is really boring. The radio wave part is easily won, the sentence section takes forever despite being overly easy, and if you know nothing on astronomy like me, the telescope part is a nightmare. I don't even try finding the right constellation; I just keep getting it wrong enough times until Botley tells you the answer. It's either that or listen to every long description until you blindly hope to find the right one.

Wheel of Invention: I don't know why there's a long pause between every question. Like I said though, I didn't want to interrupt the music so I just left it as it was. Not much else to say.

Kitchen: On Level 3 the only thing that really annoys me is the odd molecule measurements, but it's a fairly easy game otherwise. Math is my strong subject anyway so this was never troubling for me.

Maze: Everyone seems to hate this game. I love it. Of course, that may just be my engineer mind. I'm not really a fan of how you can't tell where teleporters take you unless you actually try them though - they needed a way to indicate where a teleporter exit was. Since this one usually takes a lot of time to finish, especially on Level 3, I'll probably be editing parts where all I do is think in later videos.

Virtual Collection: I have to be honest, I had never gotten a math based puzzle on my first playthrough of this game, so it took me by surprise to see it here. Not that I'm complaining, as I am a math person after all. I really like this one primarily for its music, though the puzzle is also fun to do.

Generator: This one always makes me nervous because they go to great lengths to make you feel like you're in a hurry. But that's exactly why I love this one. I had a brainfart with one equation but otherwise it went well.

Music Hall: Not much to say here.