Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? description

Educational games are usually boring or too primitive. The children of them wrinkle their nose at the big games, as soon as I realized what was happening, and not rely on the choice of adults. Exceptions, like Oregon Trail (by the way, the oldest fossil), constitute a small fraction of the rest - that, in the opinion of the marketing team, should appeal to kids: count to ten with Mario, Russian language with Smeshariki, the book of Psalms with Masha and bear. And if the same kinolitsenziyam allocated some funds, the colors of life poured what scraped the bottom of the barrel...

But Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? rate does not to accessible to children, although it is not prohibitively difficult, and not for educational reasons, though he is present, and a good mechanic, combining these and other things that serious change was passed almost 30 years. How many can be called games with original ideas emerging from so many reincarnations?

Be described WitWiCS? (I will limit myself to just CS, right?) partially as a Board game with detective elements. The world of crime headed by Carmen Sandiego hungry for much valuable artifacts that are gathering dust on the shelves of museums around the world. Every week something will be lost: the sword of the Emperor whistle in Japan, then coconut pull somewhere in Oceania. The allotment to apprehend the attacker comes straight to Interpol and from there straight into your hands.

But by the time he was gone, and first you need to understand where it went, and here is the whole globe. Well, almost — the game has a total of 30 cities. Arriving at the crime scene with a Notepad at the ready on the Protocol to interrogate witnesses about suspicious individuals. Visiting the Bank, you can find out what currency they traded, in the library — which books studied, in the Harbor — the ship under what flag floated on the stock exchange buying what are interested. But all these facts - and they are chosen randomly, and the procedure of their provision, and a set every time - may not be enough, if the investigator has white spots in geographical knowledge. Of course, Wikipedia, Google or, at worst, a world Atlas are help and cheat at the same time in a test of knowledge, but the constant use of reference materials is unlikely to bring the fun of the game.

The second element is obtaining information about the perpetrators, collecting the crumbs of signs of eyewitness accounts and entering them into the search terminal of Interpol. Sketched a fairly detailed "portrait" and reducing the list of suspects to one, the chief issues a warrant for his or her arrest. Hassle adds to the fact that every "quest" in the CS time limited and need to do a few flights in hot pursuit to catch runaway looting of museums and other cultural institutions. The clock is ticking and in the rest of the classroom: interviews with witnesses, visits to the computing center, Interpol, and the character need to have a good sleep, and 8 hours per day reserved for this.

Of course, not all necessarily difficult from each city, with flights departing only 3-4 destination, which are shown on the map, and guess what, say, South America and Japan don't use francs, can be a process of elimination. The difficulty here is falling into the hands of the random number generator, which may ask, and where the Chinese people live, and what country is famous for its goats. But this randomness and ensures that the game is almost legendary replay value.

Sending to the bench thieving comrades, Interpol will increase the player's rank and gradually to complicate your task, until finally he won't have to hunt for the ringleader to this whole criminal organization, Carmen Sandiego — the fatal lady in the red coat.

To say that all of the above has provided a popular and comfortable existence, — to say nothing. Apart from a few re-releases were variations on the theme of time travel, space and even North Dakota (allegedly one of the American States). In the future, they acquired new elements and was supplemented by a large number of cities, suspects and clues, but the basic idea remained the same. Moreover, one of the latest incarnations is available on Facebook and on mobile phones. Not to mention the fabulous profits that the game was brought to publishers of geographical atlases and encyclopedias. Whew... But that's not all — based on a computer game was and its popular teen game show, which has lived on television for a few years.

And if all this does not convince you at least a glimpse on CS, then geographer of you useless.

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Source: Archive.org, Mobygames.com