Saving Hooverville, one factory at a time.
A game in the JumpStart Edutainment Game series for fifth-graders, naturally enough. What starts out as a normal field trip for the titular Jo Hammet turns into a race against time to save the fair city of Hooverville. The Mad Scientist Dr. X has planted bombs all around Hooverville's industrial district as revenge for them cutting off his research funding, and it's up to Jo to find and disarm the bombs before they go off, crippling Hooverville's economy.In order for Jo to reach the bombs at all, she needs to gather three particular items from certain places around town, provided you do an activity first. Help Bernie mix up some drinks at the Squishy Juice Bar, collect some artifacts in Hooverville's mines for Maggie Mead, and assist Jimmy the Shadow in reorganizing some trash at the city dump, all while trying not to get caught by Dr. X's goons.
This game provides examples of:
- Acid Pool: Jo has to walk across one at the chemical plant. She survives by wearing multiple socks, as every step (forward or backward) dissolves one sock.
- Adults Are Useless: Especially the factory technicians who are all too cowardly to do anything about the bomb, but are totally okay with a ten-year-old girl risking her life to disarm it. This is Played for Laughs, of course. ("You're not coming?", "I think I'll wait in my car.")
- Averted with the Spatula Factory technician - you actually have to talk to him and give him the idea to use a giant spatula as a makeshift catapult.
- Alphabet Soup Cans: Isn't it convenient how all the puzzles Jo has to solve just happen to be at her grade level?
- Ambiguous Syntax: "Get in there and be a good little girl. Then maybe we'll feed you... to the fishes, that is! Heh, heh, heh!"
- Big Dam Plot: Dr. X's final plan is to blow up Hooverville's dam, which would cause the entire city to be crushed by water pressure.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall:Jo: Without nerds, we'd have no computers. No computers means no computer games and without computer games, where would we be?
Janitor: Probably the funny papers. - Catapult Nightmare: Dr. X declares his revenge in the opening cutscene. As Hooverville is slowly blown up, a fleeing Jo gets caught in the blast... cut to her screaming in bed.
- Circling Birdies: Stars circle around Jo's head when she gets hit by a rock in the mine shaft.
- Continuity Nod: In the last level of the game, Jo tells Bernie she needs a vacation and asks him for ideas. He tells her there's a nice vacation spot on Mystery Mountain. Jo says that's not what she had in mind.
- Cool Board: Jo rides around Hooverville on her skateboard.
- Creator Provincialism: The museum contains only Western art, and only from as far back as The Renaissance at that.
- Dialogue Tree: Generally, the game wants you to select lines which are polite, honest, and get to the point. There are also funny smartass lines which are fun to select, but which nearly always dead-end the conversation.
- Fetch Quest: Jo has to collect three items around Hooverville that will help her reach each bomb. Thankfully, unlike the previous two games, the amount of items have been severely reduced to just 18, since there are only six missions.
- Four-Fingered Hands: Jo Hammet and all the other characters.
- Free-Range Children: Seriously, what were Jo Hammet's parents thinking? Would you let your ten-year-old daughter skateboard around the city at night, dodging a madman's goons and breaking into sabotaged industrial plants? And there's no way they couldn't have known about it because it's implied that she became the town hero. Of course, the game solves this issue by just never showing or mentioning her parents.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: The first level is essentially a breather level. During the skateboard stages, the thugs never come after Jo at all so you're virtually in no danger. From the second level onwards, the thugs will begin to chase her, and during the Mad Libs minigame, they will start talking about what Jo might do to disarm the bomb. This actually makes sense - the thugs haven't been told to go after Jo yet. Once she becomes a legit threat, Dr. X sends them out to keep her from disarming the bombs.
- Genre Shift: The is the first JumpStart game to break with the Wide-Open Sandbox format in favor of a more linear structure. It's also the first to have a Player Character in place of an Exposition Fairy.
- Interface Spoiler: Every area you can visit can be highlighted on the map - including the obvious dam that you can select, but Jo Hammet will say "I can't go there, I'm on a case". It makes sense that she would object to going there (since she has no reason to) but the player will obviously know that she'll have to go to the dam at some point, along with every other location.
- Lampshade Hanging: Jo Hammet points out that one of Dr. X's targets is a spatula factory. This is but one of many things she does...
- MacGyvering: Sometimes Jo uses two items together to help with approaching and retrieving a bomb.
- Mad Libs Dialogue: Averted - while you do have to play a Mad Libs game, you have to actually select the words that make sense, thus teaching context.
- Metapuzzle: The crossword puzzles at the beginning of each chapter all have marked squares. Once the crossword is fully solved, the letters in the marked squares must then be unscrambled to decipher Dr. X's next target. Fortunately, Jo takes care of the second step automatically.
- "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: The bomb in the Oil Refinery results in Jo doing this, since it's protected from all sides by a grid of security lasers.
- Never Say "Die": Despite death being mentioned several times, they never outright say that someone will die - either that an exploding chemical tank will "wipe out all the people" for thirty miles, that a bomb in the Oil Refinery may cause someone to drown in oil, that Dr. X will be blown to bits and there's Jo's exchange with Jimmy - however that case is justified.
- Pixel Hunt: In the museum. There is a reason the Crossword Puzzle is considered the most annoying task...
- Rod And Reel Repurposed: The Steel Mill mission involves Jo having to use a fishing rod to reach a motion-sensitive bomb, since the floor is flooded with molten steel.
- Save the Villain: During the climax, Jo considers doing this, thinking in voice-over "I can't just leave him there to be blown to bits". But when she looks back, she sees that Dr. X has already mysteriously disappeared.
- Sleepwalking: In the skateboarding game, one of the recurring pedestrians is a sleepwalking guy wearing a nightgown and cap.
- Small Reference Pools: In addition to Pixel Hunt, the averting of this trope is what makes the crossword puzzles so difficult. It would be hard enough for fifth-graders to search the museum for the names of artists basically everyone has heard of like Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso, but here come crossword clues about Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
, Winslow Homer, and Paul Klee! - Speaks Fluent Animal: Supposedly, this was what Dr. X's research was supposed to do. He claimed putting an octopus on his head would enable him to do it; his minions wear octopi but their power is telepathy instead. Inverted with B.F. Skinny, who is a Talking Animal.
- Think of the Censors!: Combined with Nonstandard Game Over. If you fail to disarm the bomb in the steel mill, Jo breaks the fourth wall to inform you that you have to try again because bombs can't go off in an educational game.
- Towers of Hanoi: If you get caught by the goons, you'll be sent to a dungeon. To escape, you have to play a version of this where you stack crates up to a broken window.
- Underground Level: The mine shaft activity. You have to bring Maggie Mead one artifact from each of the three layers of the mine shaft, which get older the further you go down. The top layer is The American Revolution (mostly), the middle layer is Pre-Columbian Civilizations, and the bottom layer is Prehistoric Life. There are also falling rocks to avoid. On the easy level, Maggie just tells you what items she needs, but on the higher levels she'll only give you clues about the items.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: The game's snarky dialogue includes references that are sure to go well over the head of your average fifth-grader. Unless, of course, you think most fifth-graders would get jokes about Jimmy Hoffa.
- Wham Line: The first time you get a skateboarding level after the first case, you hear someone saying:Goon: There she is boys, let's get her!
- What the Hell, Player?: If you select the rude, sarcastic lines in the Dialogue Trees, you may get this kind of response from the character you're speaking to.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The game ends with one of these, which recounts what happened to all of the characters. This includes the janitor's broom, who "went on a national tour ending with sold-out performances at Carnegie Hall. He's sweeping the nation."
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The mine shaft activity gives contradictory information about Hooverville's location. On the top level, the artifacts are from British colonial America and the early years of U.S. independence, implying that Hooverville is located on the east coast of the United States. The next level down has Native American artifacts, mostly from tribes that lived in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, including artifacts from the Aztec Empire. Obviously, these artifacts can't be from the same location.
- Writing Around Trademarks: Lampshaded. In the thugs' thought balloon conversations, they make reference to "lamp sabers from the movies", "an arachnid like human who wears a red suit and is the copyrighted character of a large, well established comic book company" and "that famous fictional character who lives in the jungle with the chimpanzee companion named after a member of the feline family."
