Sid Meier's Covert Action

What a great game this was back in the day, and now it has returned. The game was simply ahead of its time, w/ the main limitation being graphics and sound. This was a perfect mashup of puzzles, twitch skills, and stealth action. The fact that you could overcome some of the tougher puzzles by doing a risky breaking and entering job was top notch. I particularly liked the spycraft era this was set in with all of the subversive organizations included in the mix. The game also had long legs, as missions were randomly generated using different motives, locales, operatives and those criminal organizations. You never knew whether you'd be stopping a plot involving the KGB, Red Battalion, or the Junta. The mini games was what this game was all about. I got really good at Cryptographs after playing the decoding mini game. You also had to connect circuits for wiretaps, bypassing alarms, etc. The B & E's were the highlight. I always tried a non-violent approach, knocking out guards rather than going on a shooting spree. The controls are all keyboard and not real easy to remember but work well. Of course, mission outcome and score was always the TM of these games. Solving the sinister plot resulted in a Bond-esque screenshot featuring women (or men for "Maxine") that ranged from your agent doing laundry at the laundromat with an optically challenged lady, to handing out roses to a trio of VGA knockouts! I'm glad to see Max back in action in the age of digital distribution.

Admittedly I have a nostalgic connection to Covert Action as I played it fairly extensively as a child however it holds up even after 20+ years. The procedurally generated cases offer a good amounts of variety in gameplay options and it has action and puzzle elements and a good range in difficulty scaling between the four difficulty settings. The action sequences have the right balance between stealth and action with a 2D overhead view that feels rather arcadish (especially if you get discovered). There are electronics puzzles that are similar to "complete the pipe" type puzzles where you try to get electricity to certain points by swapping tiles (and in harder difficulty you have tiles that can't be swapped and energy generating tiles that will generate current if they have no current going to them to increase the difficulty). The cryptographic puzzles are at the simplest level simple replacement but increase in complexity at higher difficulty levels. The only real weak point is the frustrating "driving" mode -- it is almost impossible even at the simplest difficulty level and winds up being downright frustrating at higher difficulty levels where you can't just rely on using the other game modes to get information for your case. None the less this remains one of my favorite games and even now I break it out at least once a year to run through a few cases.

I love Covert Action, but I'll be the first to admit it's because I learned how to avoid certain minigames for most playthroughs. Covert Action is an old gem that covers the kind of randomized gameplay that is now hollowly echoed by the likes of Skyrim's "Radiant" quests as if it's some amazing new discovery. You have a goal and a set of skills that allows you to reach them; track down terrorists, collect clues for the more long term game of apprehending a set of elusive masterminds, and catch them all like a set of mad bombing Pokemon. The difference from randomly generated games these days is that success or failure isn't a binary state. Sometimes you lose, but you still have more information on the people you're tracking. The next time that villain pops up, you're better prepared to apprehend them. Failure becomes a building experience, not a dead end. If you're fine with state of the art graphics and gameplay from a time before people realized they could eat eggs, it's a rock solid way to spend your gaming time. Sid Meier, the designer, was disappointed with the game. He felt it had too many minigames, and that none of them were very fun. This is kind of valid; I definitely hate the driving sequences, but equally love the stealth action segments, wire tapping, and cryptography. If you start on easy to train yourself and slowly amp up the difficulty, the challenge is masterful and gives you the tools you need to stick to your own strengths, to avoid the parts you like less. The game feels smart, too. You can hang back and collect intel over the wire, or go in and steal files, follow cars. The world feels comprehensive and wide open, in an 80s DOS kind of way. There's a lot to do and figure out. Covert Action lacks the scope of Sid Meier's timeless Civilization series, but is also playable in micro-doses. It's another game I can come back to, time and again, for a few sessions when I don't feel like blowing three weeks on an epic.

Oh man does this game set of a Nostalgia Bomb of memories! While the Graphics of course arent by any means stellar, it had a mix of James-Bond eqsue intrigue and fun that was hard to beat. Very much a Cold-war in a nutshell but also now kind of an eerie foreshadowing of how much in todays world there is with spying and bugging and terror plots and the like. Also there are parts where you have to follow suspects, and also keep in memory of who is who in a terror cell, the Planner, the bomb-maker, the forger, and of course every crimnal enterprise has..The Mastermind! Catch him or her and you can really do well! If any of this sounds like you would enjoy it I wold ay go get this game it will keep you entertained!

I love this game, I wish there was a remake, but Covert Action is fascinating to me. The controls are horrible, you spend a ton of time trying to break into buildings with rooms like "Chair room" where almost every single tile is filled with a chair, often times facing each other in such a way that they are both unusable as anything but a crappy bed. There's also the popular "office" which has desks that have absolutely no logic to their placement, and it's common to enter the room and have to hop over a computer desk because your path is blocked. It's even better when you can enter a building into a room that isn't connected to any of the others, this isn't game breaking, but it wastes your time, and time is a HUGE deal in this game. The basic premise is that you need to prevent a horrible terrorist activity from happening by solving clues using cryptography, breaking and entering, and finding evidence. If you can, then you can track each member of the plot and throw them in jail. This is a very challenging game even on easy. Like I said before, the controls are bad, so each one of the many minigames might control completely differently from the last. Combat is.. rough, and on higher difficulties it's unfair. Cryptography is one of my favorite activities, as is the wire tapping, they are both fun minigames that need to be completed in a timely manner. Time is your biggest adversary in this game as, depending on your difficulty, you need to rush to figured out what's happening and who's doing it. On easy, you have plenty of time and can make quite a few mistakes with, at worst, a couple of guys escaping. On hard though? It's insane, and things start going down immediately, almost demanding a innate knowledge of the game mechanics to even be remotely possible. This probably isn't a good game, but I still happily play it from time to time.