Codename: ICEMAN

Codename ICEMAN is very hard to recommend. It is a "serious protocol" game, similar to the early Police Quests, that is: in order to succeed, you MUST follow a real-life protocol, no matter how utterly tedious it is (case in point: you are a patriotic army guy here, so you MUST salute the flag every now and then). Problem is, breaking the rules are not fun as in, say Space Quest. Also, it is an "genre expanding" game, that adds a dreadful "simulator" element to the standard adventure fare, supposedly to spice up the game. Bad idea. The submarine simulator is tedious, unresponsive and needlessly hard. Problem is, it is not a good diversion as, say, the arcade segments in the Conquest series. The story is bland. The puzzles are unfair. The hero is not very likable. Hmmm. Better go play the other, less experimental, but much more fun Sierra titles.

Not going to lie, this game is tough. I could see where it wouldn't appeal to someone looking to unwind and relax for a few hours playing adventure games. There are lots of ways to die, and as with most Jim Walls games, procedure is paramount. Read the manual! That said, I have always felt there is a lot to like about Iceman. It's just a different experience. The game was pretty groundbreaking for its time - submarine simulator, receiving and decoding encoded communications, following Navy protocol, political tensions over control of oil. The game is a product of its time and as long as you enjoy Sierra games (death) and go into it with that understanding, it's an interesting product that mashes several different types of gameplay together. No Sierra collector should be without it in their collections, especially at this price.

I grew up on Sierra games. I loved the challenge and even found comedy in the frankly sadistic ways that they tricked you. I always knew that you could not go into a Sierra game without expecting to have to restart the game once or twice because of a silly mistake. Unfortunately, Codename: ICEMAN takes things a bit too far. The game starts out promising enough. The graphics are similar to those of Police Quest, another of creator Jim Walls' productions. The music is fantastic, written by composer Mark Seibert. There's a definite old-school Sierra charm to the introduction. Within minutes, however, the game forces you to perform CPR on someone using the exact steps written in the manual. I had mistakenly assumed that this was a one-time thing, an old copy protection that they had to get over and done with. What I did not realize was that the rest of the game would involve frequent, tedious revisits to the manual. The game waivers back and forth between being too easy and too difficult. There are entire sections of the game that require hardly any thought at all, just the ability to copy text directly from the manual. Then there are entire sections of the game that rely solely on luck, such as the real-time submarine battles and the frankly baffling inclusion of a Yahtzee-like dice game, both of which are frustratingly long and frankly unnecessary. The game contains many of the classic Sierra style traps and pitfalls; however, many of them seem to revolve around the general incompetence of the NPCs, whether they're drunkenly gambling at work or handing out you someone else's ID after you visit a government building. The problem with this game compared to other Sierra titles is that replaying the game after one of these pitfalls is awful, due to the unskippable arcade sequences. Whatever charm the game may have started out with is rapidly lost, and I think that's what really bugs me about Codename: ICEMAN - so much potential wasted on such a poorly designed game.

This game is one of the top hardest, most procedural games Sierra ever published, with the help of Jim from Police Quest. Don't worry: Manual and Hintbook included. It still won't help. Haha. Hahahaha. Muahaha. *cough* It's hard but oh so good.