Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? review - Sega Megadrive

Poor old Carmen Sandiego. She's merely a victim of an uncaring consumer society, cast out as a social pariah because of her poor GCSE grades. There was only one thing she could do - assemble a cartel (called VILE) of time-travelling criminals and wreak terrible vengeance throughout the space-time continuum.

You, on the other hand, are a time cadet of the Acme Detective Agency and it's your job to put a stop to her nefarious plans. This is achieved by using your Chronoskimmer time-travelling device and your natural detecting abilities.

The presentation of Carmen Sandiego is simple in the extreme. The main display is taken up by the chronoskimmer's control panel, with a smaller sensor picture of your surroundings on the side. Using the panel, menus are selected which amongst other things allow you to questions suspects, compile evidence and set course for your next destination. This might make things sound easy, but be warned, you only have a limited amount of time before you are pulled back to Acme HQ.

What the Mean Machines staff thought

The fact that this is a supposed "edutainment" cart did put me off initially, worried as I was that it would be all edu and no tainment. Certainly, the graphics are about as thrilling as a Bullseye Christmas Special, and the sound is most poor - there's no tune and only a few gasping effects. However, it didn't take me long to become quite engrossed in the investigative gameplay. The educational element really doesn't make itself apparent except for the reference book style to each country and time period as you arrive. There are a couple of problems though. Carmen Sandiago is huge, for sure, and there's a password system so you can restart from your last case, but each case is much of a muchness. It takes a long time to complete, with later levels featuring really unforgiving time limits, but there isn't an awful lot of variety. There's also a pointless infinite continues option which takes most of the thrill out of the game. After all, whether you capture the criminal or not, you still don't have anything to lose. Still, if brain exercising is your thing, yo won't be too disappointed with Carmen Sandiego.

Usually, games that have pseudo-educational overtones are about as thrilling as train spotting on Dyli Junction on a cold, wet day during a British Rail strike. This one isn't quite as bad as all that, and provides quite a bit of fun at first as you whizz your way around time itself in search of dastardly villains before your time limit runs out (although I can't understand why you run out of time when you have control over it). However, complete a couple of levels and the game's weaknesses are revealed: apart from the increasingly tighter time limit, there isn't much difference between levels, and after a while it all becomes a rather repetitive and routine game. Yes, there are things to be learned from this, but it's all trivia-type stuff rather than anything of major benefit. While I certainly don't want to knock original ideas, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego just doesn't offer quite enough entertainment or education to be a truly worthwhile purchase. It's fun for a while, but personally I'd prefer to thoroughly enjoy myself playing a pure out-and-out videogame and then turn to a really decent book of my own choosing and learn something of real value in the process.