Whenever something claims to be 'crazy' (meaning 'funny' or 'wacky') in the title, you should be careful. It usually means the product won't be crazy at all, but rather lame. Simple reason: They try too hard, it all gets too obvious. Die total verrückte Rallye (literal translation: the totally crazy rallye) fortunately only stumbles into this trap partly, keeping the lameness factor at a bearable minimum (if only there weren't this 'announcer' with his GDR / Berlin accent...).
Infocom takes us back to the times of Cold War, in a classic tale of spies the two blocks collide, and only you can stop an evil plot before time runs out.
That is, the authors throw you in the role of three of the said spies, who find themselves in a small imaginary country near the west-east border, where a high ranking ambassador is going to be assassinated.
Now, I would bet that at least half of our readers don't even remember the Cold War firsthand. When the game was released in the late 1980s, it was still very much alive, though, in spite of the slowly developing, but still very fragile attempts at Perestroika and Glasnost.
In the old, golden days, video games where thematically almost exclusively catering for a single target audience: male adolescents. Logically, some fantasy themes were recurrent: saving the earth and all of humanity or even the whole universe. Those were the goals and challenges of tomorrow's family men. Gaming having grown up, yesterday's youths are now confronted with reality. Those old dreams have been tainted as childish and the games industry now also delivers realism into the formerly well kept play rooms of today. One way of doing this apparently involves simulating every single job, no matter how absurd, and also every single every day activity, no matter how trivial, in a game. Resulting in increasingly obscure products in which the original ideas can hardly be recognized anymomre. Though even in the good old days, us heroes had to take a couple of collateral damage hits and, for example, resign ourselves to the role of a simple taxi driver. The implication being boring drives from A to B, where the highlight of the day is exchanging some gossip with the passengers. Unless, of course, it was Space Taxi.