Thoughts by Wandrell (22 Jul 2012) – PC
In the long saga of Carmen Sandiego this famous criminal has fled all around the universe. She has been stealing through USA, Europe, the world in general and even space. But this time she is stealing through time, and only you, and your knowledge of history, can stop her from committing the biggest robs in all time.
Basically, you can say this is just like any other Carmen Sandiego. That’s the good thing of it’s basic design, I suppose. Just change the trivia and you can create a new game, in a new setting. Still, it’s that trivia what makes most of the game, so you can’t say it’s not a logical step for these series.
I must say that for all they worry about trivia and facts, that the main bad girl has a curious name. Is she supposed to be Spanish? Because Sandiego is no surname. San Diego, just as the city, on the other hand means Saint Didacus, which, as it looks like, is the name of a saint, not a surname. But I digress.
Your job will be a detective one. Each you get into your Chrono-Skimmer the boss will send you a mission. A new rob in time. All you will have to do is reach the place, and start finding clues.
These are of three kinds: witness, informant or scanner. Each takes a few hours, a limited commodity, and will give you different results, but which always will be a trait of the criminal, or a hint of his or her next target.
Here there are two things that should be talked a bit more. First the time you have, because travelling through time doesn’t mean you don’t have a deadline, and each jump to another era, or any attempt at getting more info, will consume a bit of the time you have. Run out of time and the investigation has failed.
The other thing is that each criminal has a series of traits identifying them. Sometimes it’s clear that a dark haired woman has dark hair, other times you will be told the name of his favorite book, and from this you’ll have to know the author’s name. All this info is marked, manually by you, on a dossier, which once it has enough data will serve to get an arrest warrant for the criminal. Fail to do this, and when you find the guy all you’ll be able to do is watch him flee.
Maybe nowadays with Internet these games have lost most of its charm. Or maybe not, because, after all, they came with an almanac to search for all the data. Well, now I think about it, nothing has changed. Carmen Sandiego games were made with the idea of making children look for information, and nowadays the only thing that has changed is the way this info is searched. So you can say this is one game that didn’t get any older.