Jump Start Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain - Gameplay

Gameplay

Each of the game's twenty-five missions (one for each robot that must be rescued) begin with the user selecting one of Polly's questions from the TransQuizzer. On the TransQuizzer, Ms. Winkle poses a historical question of Polly and Polly gives a surreally humorous answer. Polly then appears on a monitor to state which robot she has sent back in time for the question and to list the four Mission Clues that need to be found for the mission.

Botley, using his powerful sensory device, then determines which games need to be played in order to retrieve the needed Mission Clues. Once all the Mission Clues have been collected, the user will still need to collect an increasing amount of Invention Points in order to be allowed to enter the Time Machine Mission Control. The amount of Invention Points required to enter the Time Machine gradually increases over time. For the first five missions, the player must earn 1000 Invention Points. For missions six through ten, it is 1500 Invention Points. A total of 2000 Invention Points is needed for missions eleven through fifteen. For missions sixteen through twenty, the minimum is 2500 Invention Points. For the remaining missions, it is 3000 Invention Points. However, in the original 1996 edition and the 2000 re-release of the game, the number of Invention Points required was fixed at 1000 for all 25 missions, and the aforementioned changes stated above were only implemented in the current edition.

Once inside the Time Machine Mission Control, the user has to get past the Wheel of Invention in order to acquire a Time Key and enter the Time Machine itself, though Polly has apparently reprogrammed the Wheel so it's not just a quiz, but rather a quiz show called "Pollywood Squares." Here, Monty Monitor quizzes the user with questions that provide the point in time where Polly has sent the missing robot and which eventually reveal the correct answer to Polly's original test question.

After this activity is completed, the user enters the Time Machine and travels back in time to retrieve the robot and bring it back to the present, where the rescued robots are deposited in an area called the "robot roost." After the robot has been rescued, the user begins a new mission by selecting another question from the TransQuizzer. The game continues in this manner until all twenty-five robots are returned to the present, at which point the game is completed.

The game takes a longer time to complete than the other JumpStart games as the user must play at least four different games for each of the twenty-five missions, totaling an absolute minimum of one hundred games in all. Such lengthy gameplay was the norm for JumpStart games made in the mid-1990s.