Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Thursday. It's actually gotten cooler outside and I'm wearing pants (instead of shorts) for the first time since like May. So that's a bit of a change from what has been the norm for the summer. Today I'm actually going to be taking a look at a computer game that I had when I was a kid that I don't think very many people have heard about. It's called Geoffrey Goes to the Fair for Windows 95 and Windows 98. So let's get into it.
The impetus for this blog post is that I actually found a playthrough of this game on YouTube. It blew my mind because for years I thought my siblings and I, along with people who were in my class in grade 3, where the only people who knew about it due to our unique connection to it, which I'll be getting into in a few minutes. Yet, due to that playthrough, it appears that more people know about it than I thought. Which is really cool.
Geoffrey Goes to the Fair is a children's activity game based around Geoffrey Giraffe, the mascot of Toys "R" Us, which is amazingly still a thing here in Canada, and is set at a typical country fair that some of us grew up with. There's a clown where you can get balloon animals from, an ice cream sundae tent, a train you can ride on, fair games, a haunted house, a stage where there are sing-along songs, and a ride along train where you learn colours. It's sort of like the mini-games section in the first Pokemon Stadium for the Nintendo 64 or all of the mini-games in the Mario Party franchise. It has very early 3-D graphics that actually rival the best early games that were released for the Nintendo 64. Oh and all the characters are anthropomorphic animals.
My siblings and I played this game all the time. We took turns of course, but it was alot of fun. However, we got it in 1996, and we didn't have a compatible computer to play it on until 1998, so for two years the only place we could actually play it was at our grandparents's place up at the lake. Then, during the winter of 1998, including during the ice storm that happened in January of that year, my dad had a laptop for work that he brought home and had with him during the ice storm when he couldn't go to work. So, we played it on that laptop. Then sometime in 2000, we got a computer that we could actually run the game on. And we did play it until I was in high school, so 2001-2002 is probably the last time I remember playing the game.
The reason we even had this game in the first place is because my special education teacher in grades 2 and 3, Mr. Burke, voiced several characters in the game. He voiced the clown that I mentioned earlier as well as several of the characters in the haunted house. I think he also voiced one of the Monkeys that operated the fair games or the one that operated the train ride mini-game. I know he definitely voiced the clown and a few of the characters in the haunted house. I was in grade 3 when the game was going to come out and my parents bought it from him. I don't even remember how much it was or anything like that, but I remember that we got it specially from him. Which was pretty cool.
My favourite mini-game was the ice cream sundae one. The idea of it is that you had to serve as many ice cream sundaes within a particular amount of time while getting the orders right by listening to the Penguin who was the ice cream parlour guy. Though I messed up a few times because I let go of the mouse before I had finished dragging the ice cream or toppings to the ice cream cup. To those of you who know me in real life, particularly two friends of mine, you know that dropping ice cream is nothing new. So the fact there was a game where I dropped ice cream when I was a kid, and couldn't even eat ice cream, is impressive. Lol.
That's all I have to say about the game. I thought it was cool seeing the playthrough and wanted to talk about the game itself because, well, it's one that I played alot when I was a kid and one I've been hoping to talk about on the blog for a while. That's all.
That's gonna be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about the trade paperback releases that I had for Batman: Knightfall. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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