To be quite honest, I didn't expect this Let's Play to do as well as it did.
If you grew up in the 1980s and 1990s - even if you did not necessarily have computer games - then it is more than likely you know who/what Carmen Sandiego is, and that the same could be said if you were alive during that time in general. For those of you who were born afterwards, consider this your primer for one of the most popular educational series of all time.
Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? is an edutainment game that saw its origins on computers in the mid-1980s, and had you play a detective working for the Acme Detective Agency that had you globetrotting around the world catching criminals are returning stolen landmarks. Your job was to take the information left by the person you are tagging and use it to figure out where they went next. That information, being an edutainment game, consists of things such as a verbal description of the national flag of your destination or what currency they are converting their money to, and if you needed help, you had to consult the almanac that came with every copy of the game. You also have to collect information about your suspect, such as what gender they are, what color their hair and eyes are, as well as their hobby, and put it through the ACME computer in order to get a warrant. Not only must you have a warrant to arrest the suspect, but the information must be correct, and both of those criteria must be met or else the suspect will walk free. All this...and you had to get it all done before a certain deadline or else the case is a bust.
But was it any good?
You bet your sweet ass it was!
It ended up being so good that, thanks to its captivating gameplay that always it launched several computer game, console game and board-game spin-offs, such as Where In The U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego?, Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, Where In Space Is Carmen Sandiego? through the next couple of years until Broderbund, which owned the right to the series, was bought out by The Learning Company in the late 1990s. There was an animated series, Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?, that aired on the Fox Kids Saturday morning block back in the 1990s that, if I remember correctly, won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Animated Program in 1995 (beating out Animaniacs and the animated series for Aladdin and The Little Mermaid in the process), which I admit I never really watched as a kid due to being big into video games at the time. Thankfully, I rectified that when the show appeared on Yahooligans! in the mid-2000s along with a bunch of other cartoons produced by DIC that I watched along with it, and I ended up enjoying it. There was also a game show based on the original game on PBS in America, as well as one that aired after it ran its course based on Where In Time, and I also watched both back in the day.
But we're going all over the place at this point. I think it's about time we played the game.
You start by entering the language you'll be playing in, then you will be inputting your name, your gender, and in the case of the consoles, your password in case you're playing from where you left off from last time. Press Start to start a new game. You'll get your case and you'll be told what has been stolen and from where, and you'll also be told the gender of the suspect reported at the scene of the crime, where you will start the mission.
You have four buttons here: "Options," which brings up the options menu, the plane that lets us fly to one of a few locations, a magnifying glass that lets us select from one of three locations to ask for clues, and the computer, which lets you put in info for the warrant and go through criminal dossiers. Whenever you fly in the plane, go to places for clues, or print out a warrant, that uses up some of your time, so you will have to use your almanac whenever you need to, memorize stuff and commit it to memory as you go along (and you'll be doing that with some things), and playing wisely. You also go to sleep near the end of a day of the week as well, which costs you about eight hours, and since you start at 9 AM on Monday and have to get results by 5 PM on the following Sunday, you'll have to play wisely - and obviously learn things - if you want to win at Carmen Sandiego.
The cases will always play out at random, so your cases will not play at all like mine. You'll get different missions at different points in the game, the locations you go to will always be different, the suspect will always be a different person. In other words, no case plays the same way twice.
I'll use my first case as an example. By scrounging up clues in Budapest, I find out that our suspect is writing a paper on volcanoes of the world, is interested in the history of Danish colonies, and is looking for Viking artifacts. We also learn that she arrived in a convertible, and that part about the convertible can be input into the "Vehicle" section of the warrant as well as her gender.
I decided to guess on the info I have and select Reykjavik, Iceland for my destination. Thankfully, when I go look for clues, I find a V.I.L.E. henchman, which means I am on the right track. If one does not show up, then that means nobody will give you clues and everybody will tell you that they have not seen your suspect, and if that happens, you have to go back to your previous location and then fly somewhere else...and that takes time. Thankfully, that didn't happen, and I get more clues for the next place I need to go to as well as more things to put in the warrant. At this point, I have three things about the suspects to place in the warrant, allowing me to narrow the suspect down to one person and create a usable warrant that will allow me to arrest that suspect at the final destination of the case. You'll know you've reached it when you see things such as an ax or a knife being thrown. When that happens, you will not get any clues when you use the magnifying glass menu, and if your warrant hasn't been filled out, you will fail, as you will not get any more details on your suspect here...so pay attention to what people say and fill the warrant out with the information when you get as soon as you get it.
V.I.L.E., by the way, is the main antagonist group set up by Carmen Sandiego, the master thief and the title character of this series. You'll be putting quite a few members of V.I.L.E. away before you can get your hands on Carmen.
The missions start out pretty easy and pretty short, but the fact that you will probably have never played this game before will even out the difficulty. As you get through the game, get smarter and get better, you'll rise through the ranks of the ACME Detective Agency and the cases will get longer, and while that feels like evening out the difficulty on paper, it does get harder. Sure, you'll know stuff, but there will be less room for error because you will be hitting more locations before you nab your suspect and one wrong move can be the difference between solving the case and not making the deadline.
After you complete one mission, you are promoted from Rookie to Sleuth, and you'll have to complete four more to get promoted again. You'll also get a case-sensitive passcode to save for when you want to play the next case later. Be sure to write it down and keep it where you can find it.
Anyway, with each case, I will be adding more and more to all the information you will need for every location in the game. This list will be small now, but wait until I do more cases and add more blog entries to this series...it will be more all-encompassing.
By the way, Brazil no longer uses cruzados as its currency, as it had already stopped using them when this 1993 console port came out. and by the time this game was coming out, they were on the way to switching from the short-lived cruziero real to the real as part of the Plano Real to stabilize the Brazilian economy.
Cumulative Cheat Sheet
London, England
- currency is pounds
- red, white and blue flag
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
- taipans
- red, yellow and black flag
- coconuts
Reykjavik, Iceland
- volcanoes of the world
- Danish colony
- Viking artifacts
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- currency is cruzados
- green, blue and yellow flag
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