Saturday, October 15, 2011

Review: Who Is Oscar Lake?

Who Is Oscar Lake? is supposedly the first language-learning program of its kind so I decided I would check it out. I'm trying to learn German so I wanted to use it for that purpose. It also sounds like a pretty cool game at first. No repetitive drills or endless vocabulary lists instead, Oscar Lake plunges you directly into a foreign city where you must solve a puzzling mystery in a new language.

Who Is Oscar Lake? [screenshot]



















Experts agree that language immersion is the most effective way to learn a second language so I'm all up for a gaming environment to practice my new language. With Oscar Lake you learn by hearing, seeing and doing. And because you interact directly with all the characters you meet, you control the pace of the story, the speed of the learning and even the outcome of the game. With its multiple possible endings, Oscar Lake can make you the hero who recovers the stolen diamond or the sucker who ends up taking the rap!

OK so at first I'm getting very excited about this - especially the prospect of multiple endings. Unfortunately as soon as I loaded it onto my MacBook Pro 15" laptop I quickly started to lose my enthusiasm. The game was originally released in 1995 and programmed in Flash and it shows. The screen was very small on my screen to my surprise and the speed of the game and bad response from multiple mouse clicks reminded me of the 90's. Who Is Oscar Lake's simple point-and-click mechanics, use of recorded speech, and mix of pre-rendered backgrounds with live action video represent common development techniques of the 1990s.

As an archive of gaming this game is an interesting archive with interesting moments at points throughout the game but overall I can't say I would recommend it for learning a new language. If they could develop something modern with better controls and updated graphics this could be a really interesting concept - but I found it to be difficult to learn with the buggy performance and interface. If you are curious about this game and want to track it down you can start your search on their website which appears that it hasn't been updated since 2003; whoisoscarlake.com


2 of 5






Have you played Who Is Oscar Lake? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below.