Secret Mission
The CD-i is definitely a niche beast unto itself, and seems to be most often referenced for its role in the Nintendo/Sony drama of the '90s, the odd Nintendo-licensed Zelda and Mario games, and for just how awful it is. I'm not here to make a case for whether or not a CD-i is worth owning, but I do want to talk about a PAL exclusive that seems to only be known in very small circles, and that's Secret Mission.
Secret Mission is a traditional point and click adventure from Microids that falls right in line with the games of its era on PC. You play as "Jeff," an American secret agent in the early 1950's cold war. You fly into Opalia, a small, volatile country being manipulated by both the US and Soviet Union for its strategic value and position. You are immediately struck on the head by an assailant that himself is instantly shot down by a sniper, and taken to your hotel room by an unknown carrier.
Upon waking up, you are called downstairs to meet up with a Russian femme fatale who tells your now amnesiac self that you are actually a Russian double agent here in Opalia to feed false information and aid in a coup that will make the country a puppet Soviet state. Completely bewildered, your American contact also reaches out to you and saves your life from another attack. This is your premise- Who are you? Whose side are you really on? Why is everyone trying to kill you? The only way to get to the bottom of things is to play along with both sides, a double agent who honestly doesn't know where his loyalties lie. Oh, and along the way, you need to pick up everything that isn't nailed down and put it in your seemingly bottomless suit jacket pockets.
Now that we're in this mess, how do we navigate it? With utterly slow controls, of course! You can control Jeff with either the packed-in remote or the controller (I always go controller). Everything works pretty much as it should, but instead of a cursor, you control your character directly, walking up to each person or object with which you'd like to interact until a picture appears in the top right corner, at which time you can press button 2 to pull up a command list that you can scroll through by pressing up or down, and selecting with button 1. Items in your inventory can be combined, examined, used, or given, and are of course used to solve the myriad puzzles allowing you to advance through the story. The difficulty comes from how slowly Jeff moves, coupled with some wonky barriers as you try to walk around objects in a room. Positioning yourself in the exactly correct spot to be able to interact with the person or object you're trying to engage can be a little more annoying than it probably ought to be, and even by the mid-'90s standards of its time, Secret Mission still requires a good deal of patience.
Secret Mission definitely has its flaws and frustrations. However, when compared to the contemporary CD-i library, there's a lot of meat on the bone here. The premise is genuinely pretty interesting with Jeff not knowing whose side he is on, and the setting for a point and click hasn't been done to death even since. It's not as good as the Lucasfilm or Sierra classics, but does legitimately have some strong qualities, and those Lucasfilm classics aren't on the CD-i anyway. As a fairly obscure import, it's actually still relatively inexpensive, and I'd give it a solid recommendation to CD-i owners. Anyone else play this?
Reply With Quote