DoctorSpuds Reviews Things - Eli's Ladder (Simage)

RSS Bot · January 4, 2019

As is common with many rare games from the first few generations, they were just one-offs from no-name companies trying to either break into the market, or simply to advertise themselves. I honestly have no idea where Eli’s Ladder falls in the spectrum of one-offs, but as one-offs go this one’s pretty darn good. Eli’s Ladder is a math tutoring game that teaches the player addition, subtraction, and counting, it also came with a console overlay for both six and four switch Atari’s which leads me to believe the company behind this game, Simage, had a good amount of dedication behind it. The game starts off with a basic menu where you can select which game variation you want as well as how fast the timer runs, you can also change between addition and subtraction with the difficulty switches, and when you get into the actual gameplay area you’ll be mildly impressed with the amount of colors on display. There is a large black rectangle where the math problem will be displayed, lower down the screen there are four numbers from which to choose from, if you select the correct number you will be taken briefly to a screen where a strange creature, who I assume is Eli, jumps up a single rung of a giant ladder. If you answer 17-20 of the twenty math problems correctly you will be awarded with a bright blue screen and Eli jumping up and down saying WOW, apparently he will jump 100 times before you’re booted back to the menu screen but I didn’t wait around to find out. Oddly enough the game is mainly controlled by the right controller, which would be the one that the child is using, while the left controller would be used by the adult to start the game, advance to the next question, and activate the counting function, though I’ve never actually managed to get it to work for me. Honestly there isn’t much else to talk about with this one, it’s just a fairly good math game, I can understand why parents would like it but apart from that it has almost no play value. Due to this game’s staggering rarity it doesn’t come up to auction very often, but one actually sold this past December for $1,301.78+7.45 shipping, which is a pretty good deal considering it’s about the same price as a college math textbook. If I had the money I would pass on Eli’s Ladder, since I don’t need to relearn my basic math, maybe.

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