Scholastic's The Magic School Bus (Sega Genesis, 1994)

The main thing I like about this game are the minigames, especially the "reflector" game since I've reached beyond even level 70. There's a game where the magic school bus shoots asteroids which break up into smaller pieces as they are hit and another where a spring is used to launch planets into orbit to form a solar system. The odd thing with the solar system one is that planets can collide or be near each other without their gravity affecting them. Only the Sun has the gravity affecting them. It may be a processing/CPU speed limit of the Genesis that forbids the otherwise complex calculations needed for that. For very skilled gamers, these minigames do have a small downside in that they can make the game last even 5+ hours instead of just 1 hour when you're extremely skilled with these kinds of games. In my case, in theory, it's possible to be going on for nearly a whole day straight, most of which due to the "reflector" game. For kids, or those new at gaming, this isn't much of an issue since they mean extra lives.

The game is bit humorous. By humorous, I mean that the "classmates" make rather funny comments on various things you do. For example, if you take a picture of something in which you entirely or mostly miss the object, you'll get "what is that a picture of". By landing hard in the landing phase, the bus lands and makes a 360-degree flip or bounces around like a ball.

There are 3 difficulty settings. Easy is meant mainly for first-timers but there's normal and hard for more advanced players.

The game mechanics are only weak in the walking phase (the third of 5 phases). Controls are fairly easy to work with and get around for everything except the walking phase. The problem with the walking phase is that the character bounces around and motion is slow when in "mid-air" making it tricky to make some of the platform jumps in the later areas (Jupiter and beyond).

All in all, it's an excellent game for beginners or for kids, but not really recommended for experts unless you enjoy Atari-like minigames. Though over a decade old as of this review, some of the facts are still relevant but even then, it's still worth playing.