So next month will mark 20 years since I played the game for the first time, like near the end of August, the summer of 2001 was an interesting time for me as I spent most of it binge watching Scooby's All-star Laff-a-lympics and a week before summer camp watching Rugrats in Paris. And then a week after coming back from camp, I went to the library and took out Carmen Sandiego Math detective, which was probably good timing because well I'll explain it when we get to the difficulty part.


Gameplay and story: So this game is a follow up to Carmen Sandiego Word Detective (because Chase Devineaux is in the game) actually this kind of concludes Chase's saga as the game after this one is ThinkQuick challenge and I don't really consider that directly canon but I'll explain why if I get to it this TdV) This time we have to recover World Landmarks that VILE stole and were shrunk and encased in gems...well I've always wondered what the heck or where would Carmen put these things if she succeeded in her plan and for some reason this makes the most sense. Of course this was all leading up to her real master plan which was draining all of the world's power so that she can make her new headquarters invincible. Knowing Carmen there is always a master plan involved, it's kind of how it's been since World 96.


Graphics: Obviously there was a new team that worked on this game, as it does not look the same as word detective, the graphics look different, the tool pad (or Multi-task communicator as I called it, I actually used it in my fan fiction) I'll explain why it is definitely different when I talk about Word Detective, or Great Chase Through Time whichever I land on first. We can actually go back and review other messages in this game this time around.

Soundtrack: There are some new background tracks in this game however there are a couple of tracks that were reused from previous games (two that I can say for sure) and this time we get noises if we get an incoming message rather than the email suddenly popping up without warning.

Addictive: It took me about three weeks to finish this game (because I still had the patience for tv back then Teletoon was still watchable for one thing) but a good chunk of the Carmen Sandiego games are addictive I could go on.

Depth: So this game is definitely longer than word detective it took me three hours to finish this game in one sitting (that's about an hour longer than Word detective) we have two extra passcodes to locate in this game.

Difficulty: This game gets a high mark for difficulty because...it's math. I could go on and on about how much I hated that microchip decoder because there's trivia involved after we draw the shape. There is at least one activity reused from a previous game and it involves stacking. We have Atom Smasher which is a way to learn fractions...I never really learned fractions in elementary school. We have a molecule builder that's done in the same format as a crossword puzzle, there's Soundwave analyzer I think of that as the math equivalent of CODE BREAKER from the Word Detective game. I think that's all of them I can't tell if I'm missing one. ah well I can always come back to that.

Post Review follow-up: Technology wise this game is definitely an improvement and more challenging, this was among many games I had played for the first time regardless of the age limit. The game especially improves in one place, at least in this game Sandiego and Devineaux don't waste our time fighting with each other in the email which is a total waste of time, actually Devineaux has a more limited presence in the game because he spends a good chunk of the game following up on the last case that he and Carmen ever did (oh by the way I neglected to mention that Devineaux is Carmen's former partner in this saga) and he ends up closing the case just as we close this one. Math has normally been the biggest struggles for me so it's no surprise that I spent the last two years of High School doing Consumer Math which consisted of Open Book tests and no exams.


This concludes my review, join me tomorrow when I review.....*checks list* Operation Neptune for PC, also tomorrow is a thread day I will start a couple, there's actually one thread I'm excited to start.