Abandonware: Microprose's "Covert Action", Hyper 80s action! Options

[Wounded Ronin]

I just got MicroProse's "Covert Action" game, abandonware from the 1980s. The manual even says things how as of the 80s secret agents have all these cool electronic toys.

Basically, the game is a really really well done random mission generator. The game generates a terrorist plot of some kind, players, and evidence. It is your job to fly around the world like James Bond and get the evidence you need to apprehend the terrorists. Generally speaking the plot will have a mastermind at the top who is hard to get to because he will go into hiding when you arrest the low level flunkies who are actually going to do the crime. Even doing highly visible activities like raiding a safehouse will put the whole organization on alert, making subsequent investigations harder and making the higher-ups more likely to flee. So, if you want to bust the mastermind you have to do a very quiet and very thorough investigation and go to apprehend him first, which in turn increases the risk that you might take too long and the flunkies would still have enough time to commit the terrorist act.

There are a variety of ways to go about investigating a particular location. Most of them have a couple elements of realism, but are pretty unrealistic. Firstly, you can wiretap a house, which essentially means solving a logic gate puzzle of a big fake circuit board. I'm bad at logic, but I know that for people who like computer programming logic is their bread and butter. Secondly, you can wait around outside the house for someone to leave and then you can follow them in a car. The goal is to not lose sight of their car as they drive around the city but to move slowly and stay far away enough to not make the driver suspicious. However, there is still opportunity for 80s TV cop drama car chases because if you would rather arrest the person instead of follow them you can grab a highly conspicuous sports car and try to run them off the road. Thirdly, there's a code breaking minigame which is boring but often necessary, and forthly you get to gear up for some Shadowrun style action and infiltrate a given house or office.

The infiltration is my favorite aspect of the game. You can take different gear depending on what you intend to do. If you want to be stealthy and photograph documents before slipping out undetected you can take a camera, safecracking gear, some bugs, and a super Tom Clancy style heartbeat sensor thingie. If you want to go in guns blazing like Rambo you can take the uzi submachinegun, the armor, the gas mask, the frag grenades, the gas grenades, and so on. Although you can't frag rooms like you'd realistically want to you can use your grenades sort of like claymore mines and set them up as booby traps with the stroke of a button. Few things are funnier than booby trapping every room entrance you cross so that when the bad guys try to follow you they explode before they even get close.

The other awesome part of the game is that it's blazingly, screamingly 80s. The uzi SMG was real big in popular culture in the 80s, so of course that's the SMG you get to use. The CIA office where you work is filled with 1980s secretaries with loud clothes and big hair. In what was somewhat uncommon for video games in the 1980s you can play either a male character or a female character...should you take the female character, she too is a terrifying 80s woman. I don't know about you but if an 80s woman with armor and big hair hosed me down with an uzi I think I'd die of shock that much faster.

A final technical note: Since "Covert Action" is so old you will probably need to use a good DOS emulator, such as DOSBox, to run it.

I recommend that you immediately go to your favorite abandonware site and download yourself a copy of "Covert Action."