C.I.A. Adventure

The Good
Any game that moved away from the normal treasure hunting is okay by me & the premise of you as a CIA operative who has to recover a ruby that has been captured by a secret spy ring known as CHAOS sounds good. After initially making some headway in the villains headquarters, through some looking around & a bit of help you come to a standstill. Descriptions were sparse but adequate early on with no graphics.

The Bad
Implausible puzzles that you are either given no clue whatever in what you need to do, or make little sense in the scheme of things. A good example of the latter is entering the building in beginning & not being able to proceed with that object, despite being very small & easily hidden. Although I finally used a walkthrough, gone are the days of playing for months without help, I found the answers were unfair & in certain cases didn't work. Presumably not putting the exact information in. Limited parser which didn't tell you what it understood, & no interaction at all between any characters there were, left the game lifeless.

The Bottom Line
This basic early adventure was originally released on the TRS80, then versions appeared for the C64 & DOS machines, as well as later port over to Inform. I started playing the DOS game then moved over to the Inform port, but the only difference is the save facility & adds nothing to the original.

For its time it was probably good value, but it is disappointing the later port didn't take advantage of that parsers features. What starts out as an interesting spy quest, quickly turns into a guess the verb or what the programmer wants type of game, which is a shame as it could have a lot better with a bit more flesh on the bones. Adventures from Level 9 & others were entering the market at this time to soon change them for the better.