Man I can't believe I'm at the last of the Carmen Sandiego PC game pages on the site and it kind of makes me sad I can't do any more of them (no I haven't played Secret of the Stolen Drums, or the Wii game or Carmen Sandiego Returns)
Gameplay and Story: Well Carmen's plan really is diabolical this time, she's doing something so big that 12 of ACME's agents are her prisoners (included the five ACME Good Guides that were in Great Chase Through Time)...being test subjects for her big plan, they are imprisoned in a babble-on Machine that translates ordinary words into Gibberish (did I mention Carmen's Hideout is called the Tower of Babble? clever isn't it?)....okay I need to make an extras video one day that would show what the agents are saying when trapped in the machine even though I can kind of understand them, so now we have to go through 12 of Carmen's Henchmen hideouts in order to retrieve passwords that will open key stashers that would give us a key to free an agent yeah we have to do this 12 times Carmen's making us work. This game introduces Chase Devineaux dormant ACME agent...and Carmen's former partner at ACME. Eventually we do find out Carmen's real plan and we have to work to destroy that machine (yeah she was up to more than scrambling speech she basically wanted to destroy Communication as it were, for some reason I feel like she should have launched a satellite or something rather than actually I never failed to game to see how she did it
Graphics: So I'm pretty sure the same team that worked on Great Chase through time worked on this since the designs for the good guides remain the same but some things are drawn weirdly (like the computer in Otto Readmore's library) something that bugs me he looks menacing but....why is he stupid enough to hide a babble-on key under his pillow
Soundtrack: I would say the soundtrack's fine I've played it enough times to know it's good, and they all fit the crooks hideouts but when you're at the Tower of Babble, there's no background noise, however they don't reuse any of the background music from anything even though they could have easily reused the Egypt music from Great Chase Through time
Addictive: As soon as I got the hang of this game I didn't want to stop playing it, I just wish I didn't have a project about Margaret Atwood due the week I was close to finishing the game (and boy if I knew that Atwood had a book coming out later in the same year I did the project I would have mentioned it in the project)
Depth: So like I said we have to free 12 agents so we do this in 12 rounds, the first four rounds we have to recover four passwords, then the next four we do five, and then after that we do six, there are about six different activities in the game that you have to play in order to obtain a password there's code breaker which is kind of like a word search but with honeycombs that game was aggravating a bit I had to set that on level 1 all the time (especially when we had to make the words ourselves rather than have a list of words), Spellanyzer which is a spelling game, Micropix, where we actually learn more about the case, about Chase Devineax, about Carmen, we even get a sneak peak the the plot for the next game (I can't call the article about the Prometheus Rock Case an easter egg because this game came BEFORE Math Detective), in that you have to match words with nouns, adjectives, etc. There's Fusion Chamber (I hate that game so badly it's so boring) and there's the stacker game where you have to stack words in alphabetical order and it's difficult sometimes because you have to move them into empty areas and there are only like three available and in order to get the job done right you have to move another word under it in order to get everything to the far-right platform, but I'd still rather play that over Fusion Chamber and Code Breaker "Do it yourself" edition
Difficulty: Come on people I dare you to tell me you didn't crap your pants the first time you cleared the passwords at a hideout and the alarms went off, my adrenaline definitely got a workout, and I actually remember the exact day I first managed to clear the passwords at a hideout, December 31st 1999, thank god Y2K was greatly exaggerated or I wouldn't have finished the game. Oh yeah there was this annoying glitch in the game where once you exit the game at a certain point all the communications between you and Devineaux (and Carmen Sandiego and the emails) are in the wrong place (like the last cases you would have the communication where Carmen bugs you about freeing all the agents in the 11th case, and there used to be a glitch where the game would exit on you after you solve one thing in a puzzle
Post Review Follow Up: well I'm sad that this is the last Carmen Sandiego game I'll do since this is my favourite educational game franchise and it's a subject near and dear to my heart
This concludes my review....oh crap tomorrow is Sunday and I have nothing planned, and I have too much to do today to weed through one of the other websites, I definitely need to go through my MAME list and try to make an effort at finishing a game, and writing a review of it even if I have to watch a gameplay of something (and it doesn't help that I probably won't be near the best computers since my mother is off for two weeks, I lose some time tomorrow because of swimming and a fringe performance) maybe I'll just watch a playthough of Turtles in Time (hey I played it but I gotta review it, I don't have enough hours in the day to play it again especially a certain level where it seems that the turtle disappeared, yeah I have to pre-write this...and pre-play Computer Adventure) |
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