Sesame Street: Elmo’s Number Journey (N64)

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? Of course not, because it doesn’t exist.

Don’t Stop Believing

You want to feel really good about yourself? Just play through Sesame Street: Elmo’s Number Journey on the hardest difficulty. It’s about as difficult as learning your one-two-threes. No, really, that’s all the game is. Couldn’t you tell just by the name?

You play as Elmo on a quest to touch large floating numbers. You get to visit three distinctly similar locations—the Count’s Castle, the Number Carnival and Cookie Land, and touch lots of numbers. There’s definitely a lot of number touching going on, that’s for sure.

The world with the most variety is Cookie Land, which has a chocolate river and a sugar mountain. Basically, not only is this the sweetest part of the game, it is also the most entertaining, because Elmo can ride on a jet ski or a snowboard. 80% of the game takes place on foot, so it is nice when they change things around.

In each location, you have to find a “certain number of numbers”—as The Count so eloquently puts it—in order to complete that section. After you finish a world, you have to complete three simple math problems. Do that for all three worlds and you will get to watch some fireworks explode.

Yippee? Well it’s better than you think, actually. Yes it’s all a bit crappy, but we’re not the intended audience; or are we?

What it Does Right…?

To its credit, Elmo’s Number Journey has some very high quality dialogue courtesy of the voice data format present in Lucasarts Adventure Games. The controls are simple enough that a young’un can understand what to do, and the game is reminiscent of the show. This can’t be said for all educational videogames based off of existing intellectual property; most Go, Diego, Go! games are terrible.

Elmo’s Number Journey is less than a half-hour long, but I could see someone taking considerably longer if they are genuinely learning to count and subtract. The game has a strong educational element, and the environments and character models look great. Of all of them, Cookie Monster comes off the most accurate based on his television show counterpart, likely due to how erratic his animations are in the game.

It might look pants, but there’s detail. I actually saw a bird, in the background, sitting on the edge of one of the scenes. As I got close, it started flapping its wings. In The Count’s castle, portraits of Sesame Street characters appear on the walls. For something so clearly shat out in weeks, a sincere effort has led to its fruition. I think that deserves a somewhat respectful display of numbers.

So how well can you count? HA. HA. HA.