I'm basing this on my memories of playing this as a kid, but I don't remember being as mortally offended by its existence as others. In fact, parts of the game had a limited charm. It starts off with a heavily-obscured copy protection scheme when you join a beach volleyball game and then have to use the manual's CPR guide to save a dude's life. You putter around in paradise, have a submarine mission with a woman (that's a euphemism,) who vanishes the next morning and is probably a spy if you play far enough, which I did not, and get called in by the military brass for a submarine mission (that's not a euphemism.)
It's recognizable as Sierra's middling days. You walk around, you have rudimentary conversations, you pick this up and use it with that. Sierra's art and music department squeeze what they can out of 16-color displays and Ad Lib sound boards, in that special Sierra way that nobody else could.
After this, the game gets a bit less interesting. You can anticipate having fewer areas to explore when you're confined to a sub, as well as a limited selection of characters who are either extremely bland or outlandishly archetypal, but the twin troubles of a gambling minigame and a near-indecipherable submarine combat section tanked the game for me. Maybe it was my pea-sized and pear-shaped kid brain, but I couldn't figure out what the combat section wanted me to do. I abandoned the game there and never went back.
Recently, a friend and I bought the Might and Magic pack to have a revenge play of the first game, which was a bully to us in our youths. I bring this up because I can't imagine going back to this one in the same manner. We had our summer, Codename: Iceman, and it is now over.
