Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
156A playthrough of Konami's 1991 edutainment game for the NES, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, originally released for computers in 1989, was the sequel to the school computer lab hit Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? from 1985.
Broderbund's Carmen Sandiego games were among the first products of their kind to become a huge success. The games are designed to teach kids about a particular subject - history, in this case - by putting the player in the role of a crack detective. Carmen Sandiego and her gang of (unexpectedly cultured) thugs go about stealing priceless artifacts, and it's your job to follow the trail of clues and bring the culprit to justice.
In Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, the stolen objects reflect the specific era and culture from which they were taken, so the gameplay demands a fair bit more from your brain than Where in the World did. There are twelve different countries represented, and there are four time periods you can jump between, resulting in a total of forty-eight possible "locations" to visit.
Traveling from place to place in the Acme Chronoskimmer, you're expected to piece together who did it (by feeding information gleaned from your questioning into the computer database) to obtain an arrest warrant, find the thief, arrest them, and return the stolen item.
The challenge comes from two places. The first is that you have to understand the meaning of the clue that the game is giving you - for example, if someone in 15th century Japan tells you that the man that wanted to buy an alpaca cloak from an Incan weaver was a towhead, you need to recognize that he's blonde (for the warrant) and that you'll find the next clue in pre-1300s Peru. Pretty good stuff for helping kids develop critical thinking skills.
The second is that each case has to be solved within a fairly strict timelimit. Questioning too many people, going to the wrong places, and blind guessing are all surefire ways to lose. This emphasis on accuracy is where the educational part comes in - if you want to do well, you need to know the history that the game is quizzing you on.
Since the game came out well before the days of the internet, the information can all be found in the book that comes included in the game box. Weighing in at nearly 1,400 pages, "The New American Desktop Encyclopedia" is an impressively dense tome that serves as your trusty companion throughout the adventure. It's actually a pretty good reference book, or at least, it was back in 1991 when people still used such things.
The NES version of the game is a good port of the computer game. The graphics are clean and fairly appealing, the interface is straightforward and self explanatory, and as far as I know, the game retains pretty much all of the text from the original.
I really liked the silly little bits that you get from the lab and the lounge, too. The defective coffee maker made me smile more than once.
The game reviewed well when it came out - Nintendo Power gave it a 3.6 for Theme & Fun in the November 1991 issue, and Gamepro gave it all 4s and 5s in their December 1991 issue. It doesn't look as good as the SNES or Genesis versions, but it did its job just as well.
Whether or not that makes any difference in 2021 is hard to say. It's hard to imagine anyone buying this for its intended purpose in the modern day. Its shelf life has long since passed, and I'm sure there are products that would hook today's kids far better than this thirty year old NES cart could.
But still, I respect it for what it represents and for how well it succeeded in its time. I had some fun with it, too, but the novelty runs out quickly - a reasonably well-read adult is not likely going to be challenged by this. Where in Time in Carmen Sandiego? was great in its prime, but without nostalgia goggles, it's not a game that I'd recommend in 2021.
If you'd like more, though, here are a couple links to other Carmen games I've done recordings of:
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (SNES):
https://youtu.be/wnBi8d-FMWA
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (PC Engine CD):
https://youtu.be/hagb-gXFlXw
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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