Judge Gamer --> Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego Review

Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Genre: Educational
Publisher: Hi Tech Expressions
Developer: Electroinc ARts/ Broderbound software
Release Date: 1993

Yes folks, for those of you who don’t know. Where in (the world, time, the earth, the USA etc.) is Carmen Sandiego is a series of educational games (and later on books, TV shows etc) the base of the series is that you work for Acme and using a serious of clues, you must travel through time, the country etc, and find out who stole a certain landmark from a certain period. Through interviewing people, you are lead to the next location that the criminal has gone and etc. Eventually reaching the point where you catch the criminal and return the item back. The criminal is one member of “V.I.L.E” (the crime group lead by Carmen)

In this game, you are given a call at Acme Headquarters stating that “someone stole this item from this location; an unidentifiable (man/woman) was seen at the scene”.So the first thing you do, is go to the location of the crime, get information from three areas in the city, and hopefully it’ll lead you to the next location where that person went, all though occasionally you’ll get a clue about the persons appearance (which you have to use a computer to compute by in putting the details of that person, after computing, you’ll get a list of possible suspects, once the list gets down to One suspect, you’ve activated a warrant to capture that person). You know you went to the next location correctly, because you’ll see a criminal “lurking around the screen” meaning you’ve gone to the right place. If you went to the wrong place, the town’s people will act like they don’t know what you’re talking about. You are given a time limit of about 6 days to find the person, and from traveling place to place, interviewing people, and computing, you eat up some time. If you capture the CORRECT criminal by the time you’re time is up, you win, and by winning you gradually increase rank. As said about traveling, mistakes can be costly, as say if you’re in New York, and you think you’re next location is Sydney, Australia, and you’re wrong, you’ve got to go back to New York, and either re guess, or re-interview the townsfolk and then fly (which eats up a bit of time having to fly that far). In addition to the time, after about 11 PM you are required to sleep for at least 8 hours, so it makes time even tighter. (Of course, it shows the intelligence of your character for not taking advantage of sleep during flights)

The type of clues that you’re given usually varies by some of the places in town you visit. Usually when u visit a bank, you’ll be given a clue about the type of money “this person wanted his/her money changed into dollars” airports usually give clues about the flag’s type/color, every where else gives a few clues about the environment, historical history, monuments, landmarks etc.

The game’s controlling is rather simple and it’s broken down into a few menus which pretty much are self explanatory. Difficulty varies depending on how much the player knows about geography as well as any access to materials to help decipher the clues.
In conclusion, it’s a good geography game for young ones and for those older, a good kick or two, but after a while, it becomes quite repetitive.