Magic School Bus Games
Magic School Bus Games On The Computer
Magic School Bus Games On Youtube

In this second Magic School Bus game based on the educational book series from Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen, Ms. Frizzle and her class take a trip inside classmate Arnold's body. From Arnold's head to his toe, the group travels through every system, including the Upper and Lower Digestive System, the. Description of Scholastic's The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System. In 1994, Microsoft Corporation publishes Scholastic's The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System on Windows 3.x. This educational game is now abandonware and is set in a science and licensed title.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheMagicSchoolBus

The Magic School Bus It’s time for total entertainment with The Magic School Bus games. Playing is very easy, just use the controls below to have fun with the new The Magic School Bus games. This game was the first game (first of three games) in the CD-ROM series not to be based with any of the books (original series or TV tie in books), and the second game following The Magic School Bus Explores the Solar System where the back of the Bus cannot be visited.

Go To

The interior of the bus tends to theme with the day's topic

When The Magic School Bus Old magic school bus games

was adapted into an animated TV series, the publishers of the books, Scholastic Press, collaborated with Microsoft and a software company called Music Pen to adapt the books as a series of point-and-click edutainment games starting in September of 1994. The first game was an adaptation of

Magic School Bus Games

The Magic School Bus Gets Lost In The Solar System and was released within two weeks of the first episode of the show, which adapted the same book to television. Seven more games followed, ending with The Magic School Bus Explores Bugs in 2000.

Advertisement:

The games featured all of the characters from the show and covered topics visited by the show somewhat more broadly. The same basic format held throughout the series. Every game had an overall objective, usually some kind of Fetch Quest, but this was secondary to the Wide Open Sandbox you were afforded. The bus served as your Hub Level. Controlling it, you could travel to various locations associated with the game's topic, each location having at least one Mini-Game. There were also reports, supposedly written by the kids in Ms. Frizzle's class, and a number of virtual science experiments.

There was also a series of five 'activity centers' covering a somewhat different range of topics that were released from 2000 to 2001 and did not have any objective, instead focusing on information and mini-games. In an inversion of the Video Game 3D Leap, these were fully animated while the main series used a mix of animated gameplay and CGI cutscenes.

Advertisement:

The Magic School Bus video games provide examples of:

Magic School Bus Games On The Computer

Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The earliest games had short segments with the producers informing the player about what was fudged to make the story work much like they did in the show, though you had to look to find them.
Achievement System: Animals has a small one, with a few different awards being unlocked by finding different things.
Adapted Out: As with the show, several of the students from the books do not appear.
Adaptation Expansion: In contrast to the Compressed Adaptations of the TV show, in which the books were condensed into half-hour episodes. For example, the Dinosaurs book featured the class visiting every period of the Mesozoic whereas they visit only the Cretaceous in the TV version. But in the game version, you not only visit every Mesozoic period, but visit them in different locations around the world.

Advertisement:

All Deserts Have Cacti: Averted in Inside the Earth, where the canyon is in a desert and has no cacti. Justified in Animals due to the Sonoran Desert being used for the desert biome.
Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baird's_tapir Baird's tapir]] in Explores the Rainforest is oddly dark blue.
Anachronism Stew: Explores the Age of Dinosaurs has a snake in Jurassic Colorado. Snakes evolved in the Cretaceous. Although more likely it could be a caecilian.
Artistic License – Biology:
- The rabbit in Explores the Age of Dinosaurs has a hairless, pink nose like a cat. Real rabbits have 'V'-shaped noses. This mistake is fixed in Explores the World of Animals.
- Explores the Rainforest portrays toucans as having three toes pointing forward and one pointing back, when they should have two in forward and two in back. The same mistake also occurred with the parrot in Explores in the Age of Dinosaurs.
- A keel-billed toucan in Explores the Rainforest was identified as a chestnut-mandibled toucan, which also appears in the game.
- In Explores the Rainforest, frogs are shown turning their heads, something they can't do in real life.
- Explores the World of Animals has a springhare that is portrayed as a rabbit, despite being correctly described as resembling a cross between a mouse and a kangaroo.
- Explores the World of Animals also states jaguars do not roar, when they do in real life (and are shown doing so both in this game and previously in Explores the Rainforest).
- In Explores the World of Animals, DA states alligators are larger than crocodiles. It's actually the other way around.
Bottomless Pit: All of the platformers in Explores the Solar System have these except for Earth's moon, Mars, Uranus and Pluto. Neptune and Saturn consist primarily of bottomless pits with a few platforms hovering above them.
Chekhov's Volcano: You can cause one in Inside the Earth by clicking on the background in the volcano area. This adds a short trip inside the magma chamber and moves several of the characters and objects that were present prior to the eruption to other parts of the screen to avoid the lava flow while changing the view from the front of the bus to include the glowing crater and some lava flows. The area resets if you go to a different formation and come back. This can also happen in Dinosaurs as part of a transition to a different area within the same time period.
Convection Schmonvection: The characters can stand right next to the lava flow in Inside the Earth with no ill effects, and a tree that was knocked over by the eruption is notably not burning. Liz is able to burn a twig, but she has to touch the lava with it in order for that to happen.
Covers Always Lie: The cover of Explores the Age of Dinosaurs shows the bus in the form of the alarm clock time machine it became in the book and TV episode. In the actual game, it transforms into Animal Mecha instead.
The Cretaceous Is Always Doomed: In Dinosaurs, there's a Random Event in which the bus malfunctions and sends you to the end of the Cretaceous by accident. You can stay there a while or click an 'X' to skip the whole sequence, but either way the bus manages to leave just before the asteroid strikes.
Don't Try This at Home: In Explores the Solar System, the producer emphasizes that attaching rockets to a bus will not get it into orbit and is generally a bad idea.
Endless Game: Found all of the rocks/bio-clones/photos/whatever? The game will just reset with new things to find and maybe give you a printable award.
End of an Age: Explores the Rainforest was the last game developed by Music Pen, the last game released while the TV show was still in production, and the last game to feature the original voice actors as the kids. Explores Bugs, released in 2000, was the last game before the series switched to the activity centers. The series as a whole ended the next year with Volcano Adventure.
Enforced Plug: Parodied in Dinosaurs. The Mini-Game 'Dino Madness' is styled after a Game Show and is (fictionally) sponsored by T-Rex Burgers. The host, Barry Onyx, plugs them every so often.
Exposition Fairy: Some concepts and bits of trivia in Explores the Ocean and Explores the Rainforest are given by a clam and a frog respectively with some jokes