YMMV / JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain

• Awesome Music: Most of the music counts, really, but especially the generator theme, kitchen theme, Pollywood Squares theme, and observatory theme.
• Breather Level: Whenever the Painting Gallery ends up as one of the clue objectives. The gallery is so easy that it usually only requires the player to pick a background, copy-and-paste one of the object choices or quickly draw something, and choose one of the background music. In the end, this task is usually always completed in under 30 seconds. It also becomes a quick way to rack up on Invention Points if you don't have the 1,000 needed to power up the Time Machine.
• Funny Moments:
  • Most of Polly's joke answers (while disastrous if they were real) are funny, things like breakfast cereal being made with frozen fish, da Vinci not being able to make a helicopter because of spaghetti sauce... Ms. Winkle's responses are also quite funny when she states the flat-out ridiculous things are correct whereas Botley himself gets increasingly exasperated with Polly's nonsense.
  • Botley also has some remarks to many of Polly's joke answers. For example, he's horrified at the idea of the Ancient Greeks having to run marathons in high heels.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • As noted on the main page, Botley's comment that he and Cosmobot never got along but are friends now seems like a metaphor for the United States' relationship with Russia. It might have been an accurate statement in the '90s, but not so much since the latter part of The New '10s.
  • One of the outcomes from the timeline Polly created is an orangutan being elected President of the United States. In 2008, this gag became racist. In 2016, however... see below.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Previously, the same gag of orangutan as the president applied to George W. Bush who was elected four years after the game was released. Then in 2016, some people had said it had become relevant again.
• Magnificent Bitch: Polly, for the vast majority of the game, seems to have always thought out in advance how to make things extra challenging for you and Botley, stacking the deck in her favor but not without giving you your best fighting chance. Rarely does she ever seem to lose her cool, even after you've rescued another one of the robots she sent back in time to mess up something's history, and sometimes even compliments you like a Graceful Loser and Worthy Opponent. Of course, she could just be so sure of her chances because she was always planning on sending Botley back to the beginning of time to bring her own universe into existence, so she'd win in the end no matter how many times you'd thwarted her. If her father hadn't come back when he did...
• Moment of Awesome:
  • One for Bottley at the end; when Polly orders him to go to the beginning of the universe to help her answer the extra-credit question, he refuses. Polly presses that he's programmed to follow her commands as her "babysitter" robot. Yet despite being terrified and knowing his programming will kick in eventually, Bottley stands his ground because his self-preservation and Only Sane Man tendencies fuel his Heroic Willpower. Not to mention that he'd need the player to unlock the time machine and power it again, and the player obviously wouldn't hurt their guide.
  • When Professor Spark appears, he manages to diffuse Polly in under a minute without needing to raise his voice or threaten her. That's a father who commands respect.
• Moral Event Horizon: Polly crosses it at the end of the game, when she orders Botley to go to the beginning of the universe, effectively meaning she's willing to kill him to win back her test score. Is it any wonder her Laser-Guided Karma follows suit?
• Nightmare Fuel: The idea that Polly is so mad about her failing a test that she will command Botley to kill himself in a humongous explosion for her explanation of the Big Bang is frightening.
• Porting Disaster: For whatever reason, the Macintosh version of the game completely excludes all of the MIDI music, which comprises a solid majority of the game's soundtrack. This is completely inexcusable considering the fact that QuickTime Player was able to play back these types of files just fine for even longer than Windows was capable.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: As explained in Prolonged Prologue on the main page, the game's introductory sequence lasts nearly a half-hour long. There is a huge amount of exposition and extremely little player interaction, with only a total of six clicks and a Simon game across that entire span before the actual game begins. Even its cut-down version only slices off a few minutes at most.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: At times the music sounds oddly similar to Kraftwerk's "Showroom Dummies", particularly in the observatory.
• That One Level: The biosphere is generally the minigame that makes most players groan in annoyance when they find out there's a clue in it. Not only do you have to deal with stiff and awkward controls, but the minigame takes a ridiculous amount of time to finish and you only get one life before you have to restart the whole thing. Not to mention when you reach a question, you have to listen to Polly make a snarky comment before she actually asks, which is funny at first, but gets grating pretty quickly when she does it every single time. Then there's the fact that the difficulty setting determines how fast your drone flies. Do you take the easier questions at the cost of going very slow, get through the minigame as quickly as possible with harder questions, or go down the middle with average speed and averagely challenging questions?
• That One Puzzle:
  • While the biosphere is the most hated minigame, the constellation portion of the observatory gets a fair amount of hate as well. You're supposed to use the hint you get from the sentence unscrambling puzzle and match it with the proper constellation. Should be simple, right? Too bad there's a ridiculous amount of constellations to wade through! The way you're supposed to go about it is to listen to each description until you find the proper match, but thanks to the sheer excess of them making it a needle in the haystack puzzle, you quickly realize it's better to just keep double-clicking on constellations until you find the right one. It uses up mountain energy, yes, but it's a whole lot more convenient and Botley just flat out gives away the answer if you guess wrong enough times anyway.
  • Early on, the observatory is easily completed, as the first twelve times you play it, each constellation corresponds with the twelve signs of the zodiac, in order - starting with Aries and only moving on to other constellations after Pisces. If you only have to play the observatory game twelve times or less, you don't even need the clue if you know the order of the zodiac.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Simon Says door. You play it once at the start of the game to enter Mystery Mountain, and is then completely forgotten about. You actually can return, but you have to know to click a specific spot on the first floor. It does however get a funny scene where Botley's rocket reappears.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • In the Virtual Collection, the Sistine Chapel ceiling appears as it did before its restoration. This restoration was completed in 1994, two years before the game's release, making it outdated even at the time. Presumably, Knowledge Adventure didn't have access to a more up-to-date stock photo.
  • Wheel of Invention questions:
    • You're informed that trampolines were "invented over five decades ago," and asked to select the earliest year you could use a trampoline out of 1946, 1956, or 1995. The game wants you to subtract fifty from circa 1996 and get 1946. As of 2007, the arithmetic no longer gives you the correct answer.
    • 2010 is offered as an incorrect answer to a question asking what year an archaeologist might be interested in. If you select it, you'll be told that "archaeologists don't study the future."
    • When you're asked how many countries compete in the Olympics, the correct answer is 120, with 200 offered as an incorrect answer. This is outdated even for the time when the game was made. The game was released in 1996, and the Olympics that year featured 197 countries. And prior to '96, the number of countries in the Olympics had hovered around 150 for about a decade. 120 is more in line with the number of countries that competed in the Olympics during the '60s and '70s.
  • The design of the Transquizzer is very much a 90s thing with its bulbous and round features. To say nothing of the colour choices.

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