Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?
System: NES
Release Date: October 1991
Developer: Distinctive Software
Publisher: Konami
Genre: Edutainment
Track down the greatest villain of our age, but to do so, you must ask yourself Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?! You’re a new recruit at the ACME Time Agency. Crmiinals from the VILE network are stealing things throughout time! Can you use the agency’s Chronometer to save the sacred timeline?
You’re sent on a mission to find someone who has stolen something from a point in the past. ACME gives you a certain amount of time you have in order to catch the crook. From there, you can do a search and talk to a witness, shake down an informant, or run the scanner. Each of these choices will eat up time from your allowance. These will typically give you a clue on where to search next, but occasionally will also give you a characteristic of the thief. You need to collect these.
Once you get a clue on where to go, you can select travel and will be given up to four destinations during different time periods. As long as you choose the right one, you’re given an alert that a VILE Henchman has been spotted. Collected data should be entered into evidence so you can figure out which bad guy you need to capture. If you don’t enter the data by the time you catch up to the criminal they’ll get off on a technicality.
You’re going to be doing this over and over again. Don’t click the abort button, unless you want to cancel your current mission. If you run out of time, you lose, as well. I played through a few cases and started to lose consciousness, so called it a career.
Graphics: 1.5
The stills for each place and time period aren’t bad.
Sound: 1.0
The sounds aren’t pleasant and the music is few and far between.
Gameplay: 1.0
Click a button. Then click another button. Don’t click the wrong button.
Difficulty: 1.0
Back in the day, you’d want multiple encyclopedias. These days, Wikipedia is all you need.
Fun Factor: 1.0
It helps if you know some things, but it doesn’t help that much.
Overall Rating: 1.1
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego earns a D. This is a super bland game that wouldn’t keep the attention of a youngster these days, let alone back in the early 90s.