Video Game / Buzzy the Knowledge Bug

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Buzzy the Knowledge Bug is a series of children's games made by Humongous Entertainment for the early Windows computers (with ports to macOS and Linux. Each game played out like a visual encyclopedia, where you would be going through the farm, the airport, or the jungle (depending on the game). You would be able to trigger the many click points to see all the random inanimate objects come to life, as well as use the "What is this?" command to click on anything in the scenery and be taken to its definition in the index. Each game also included five mini-games, three of which were always a coloring book, an "I Spy" styled Find It game, and Trivia. Two of them, on the other hand, changed from game to game. One of them was a puzzle game (Hangman in The Farm, "What is It?" in The Airport, and an unscramble-the-word game in The Jungle), but the other was an arcade-styled game.

The games consisted of:

• Let's Explore the Farm with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug (1994)
• Let's Explore the Airport with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug (1995)
• Let's Explore the Jungle with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug (1995)

The series didn't last very long before falling to the wayside, mostly because they didn't quite live up to the popularity of Humongous' other games. Indeed, they are not as well remembered as the point-and-click Adventure Games or the Backyard Sports series. That said, they still have their own following in the Humongous fanbase.

Tropes in the Buzzy the Knowledge Bug games:

• Art Evolution: With Buzzy. In The Farm, he looked very stylized, much skinnier than normal, and rather stiff. The Airport fleshed him out a bit but he still moved rather stiffly. It was The Jungle where he was the most animated and most resembled the box art.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The Farm:
    • The crow at the vegetable garden has an orange beak, rather than black (which is reflected by the illustrations of crows in the game). It could be a red-billed chough, but it should have red feet as opposed to black. Plus, there's the question of what it's doing in a North American farm (the species lived in Asia, Europe, and Africa).
    • The beavers have white teeth, when real beavers have orange teeth.
    • The in-game encyclopedia mistakenly states rabbits and hares are the same animal.
  • The Jungle:
    • The in-game encyclopedia states coconuts are hairy when hanging from the tree. Coconuts only become brown and fuzzy when they're mature. At least they aren't shown as huskless.
    • The tent bats are clearly Honduran white bats, but they are portrayed with pink ears and noses while the real animals had yellow ears and noses. Also, Honduran white bats don't live in the Amazon. Amazonian tent-making bats are brown.
    • Macaws in the encyclopedia are drawn with three toes in front and one in back. Like all parrots, they actually have two toes in front and two in back.
    • The game also makes the common mistake of referring to venom as poison.
    • Scorpions are depicted with six legs rather than eight.
    • The squirrel monkey is missing its dark-colored muzzle, despite the encyclopedia picture getting it right.
    • Despite snakes lacking eyelids, the vine snake is shown blinking while idle (other snakes will sometimes blink as well when clicked on, but this is chalked up by Rule of Funny).
• Artistic License – Geography: In The Jungle, the Amazon, African and Asian jungles are all within an area a couple of miles wide, when in real life they are on opposite sides of the planet. Lampshaded by Buzzy:
  Buzzy: In real life, these jungles are all in different parts of the world, but I'd be too tired to talk if I had to fly back and forth, so this is much better!
• Compilation Re-release: The games were repackaged into the "Junior Field Trips Collection" in 1997, two years after their initial releases.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The original "Junior Encyclopedias" release of Farm is rife with this, with a completely different navigation bar, no minigames, and a much simpler opening sequence without The Fat Man's jingle to accompany it. Even with the Updated Re-release though, some weirdness remains, such as Buzzy's completely different design, a less fleshed-out index, and a lot fewer click points per screen. Using the Buzzy button also usually leads to him making some excited remark instead of telling the player a fact about the screen they are currently on.
• Holiday Mode: All three of the games have special things set for if you have a birthday entered in the INI file (explained in the help file), but Let's Explore the Farm takes it a step further and has special things set for Halloween and Independence day. On Halloween, you will see a Jack-o-Lantern in front of the farmer's home, and on the Fourth of July, the farmer's chimney shoots fireworks.
• In-Series Nickname: Two of them. They often just referred to them as The [Location] and the Junior Field Trips.
• Luck-Based Mission: Lost Luggage in The Airport takes this to an extreme in the 99th and final level, which is an intentional Kill Screen. It has one huge chute network with several points of entry, and it is the only way to bring a luggage into a bin. A luggage that enters the network will randomly exit out of any of the other points of entry. It gets even worse when you see how not only is the chute they come out of random, but the direction they come out is random too. There is no way to stop a suitcase from going into the wrong colored basket if it doesn't go your way. The odds are stacked against you in every conceivable way, making it nigh-impossible to beat it. Since there's nothing programmed at the end of the level to congratulate the player, anyone who actually beats this level will get sent back to Level 1 while retaining the ability to play any level since beating the penultimate one. Former developer Richard Moe later admitted he did this because he was tired of working on the game when he made Level 99 and just wanted to get it shipped, so he decided to be a sadist and make it Unwinnable by Design. He did say he regretted not giving a proper payoff in retrospect, though.
• Misplaced Wildlife: It's bizarre that an educational game series would exhibit this trope, but nonetheless in The Jungle, some wildlife is not found in the proper location. For instance, a tarsier is seen in the Amazon when in real life they are only found in Southeast Asia. Likewise an antbird is seen in the African jungle when in actuality they only live in the Amazon. Not to mention Honduran white bats are seen in the Amazon when they are only found in Central America. This wouldn't be as bad if the in-game encyclopedia didn't state the same thing. ("The... Tarsier... is found... in the Amazon jungle.")
• Musical Nod: The Airport has music from Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon and the first Freddi Fish game playing in the waiting room.
• Pop-Up Video Games: One of the main gimmicks.
• Shout-Out: So many.
  • There's a calendar in the horse stable in The Farm that contains pictures of Fatty Bear, Robby Radar, Putt Putt and Freddi Fish.
  • The Airport seemed to be the most fond of this, especially in the waiting room:
    Paging Mr. Waldo, Mr. Waldo, where are you?
    Would the owner of a small purple convertible please come to the parking garage?
    Would the owner of a teddy bear with red overalls please come to the Lost and Found?
    Calling Steven Spielberg, would you please phone home?
  • The HUD in Anteater Feeder, courtesy of The Jungle, is pretty much a lot like the one in a pretty popular first-person shooter. Right down to the mugshot, animated for about every in-game situation. Every.
• Updated Re-release: Let's Explore the Farm actually counts as this. A year prior to its release, there was a different version simply called The Farm and listed as part of the "Junior Encyclopedias" series rather than "Junior Field Trips." It featured a different user interface and no minigames, and predates the more familiar version by about a year.

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