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."

Ahh, my favorite Mircopose game. This game rocked! Break-ins, car chases, wiretaps, Masterminds, dossiers, cryptography, it truly had it all.

Nothing beats games from this era... they may not have picture perfect graphics, but they definetly make up for it with gameplay.

Go to http://www.the-underdogs.org/
That site has a bunch of great abandonware games. Mostly awesome games that didn't get the attention or money they deserved. Also, check out a horror adventure game called The Lurking Horror. I'm not an adventure game player, but tha game rules.

Having a little trouble with DOSbox. Anyone know how to use it to install a zipped install file?

I had no problems running this on an XP box, except for the wait time on the first break-in.

Oh, I got it working. Apparently my unzipping utility was corrupted and needed to be reinstalled. It had kept telling me there were no files to unzip.

Man, I was just playing this game again tonight. It was SO Shadowrun because of the very heavily 80s accented take on technology.

I feel like as a GM I should make all the opponents in Shadowrun carry uzis because uzis *are* the official firearm of the 80s.

I guess that in the context of the 80s uzis were pretty badass. They have a pretty high RoF and at the time everybody apparently thought 9mm was mana from heaven.

Automatic weapons were not all that common on the street back in the 70's. Then gun manufacturers starting making cheep fully automatic weapons (Like the Tec 9) and then selling them to anyone with money. The Tec 9 was quickly banned. However, the movie industry had full access to the Uzi, so like the Desert Eagle 10 years later, they put it in every movie they could.

Thanks for the historical background, Shadow. I didn't realize that the prevalence of uzis in movies and such was more due to their availability as props than due to the whole 80s 9mm craze. ("It has a really high rate of fire, and it shoots HYPER DEADLY CONTROLLABLE 9mm ROUNDS!")


If I were a game designer, I'd buy the rights to Covert Action from Sid Meier and I'd make a sequel which is explicitly set in the 80s. I always get angry when game companies buy the rights to something and make sequels that lack what made the original game special, so I'd be careful to preserve the elements that made Covert Action so great, namely the well done mini games and the ability to generate an unlimited amounts of random missions. A lot of people today seem to think that random generation isn't really a good thing to do in games anymore; look at how Morrowind got rid of random generation which was pretty much the hallmark of Daggerfall. However, I think that the Random Mission Generator in Soldier of Fortune II shows that random generation *can* work in a game, even a first person shooter which uses the Quake engine. The SoF II random missions were a lot of fun and provided an immense amount of replay value.

OK, another 80s secret agent 9mm joke:

Max Remington: "It looks like the head of the terrorist organization is hiding out in this building complex. Now is the time for me to raid the building and arrest him!"

Boss: "It's a bold plan but maybe the only chance we'll get to capture him. Here, I'll equip you from this secret CIA closet stash of weapons."

Max Remington: "Oh, wonderful, a MAC 10 in .45 ACP. I'll use that. The round's subsonic, and I see there's a silencer."

Boss: "No, you don't want to do that. Use the Uzi in 9mm. It also has a silencer."

Max Remington: "But it will be noisier!"

Boss: "Don't worry, we've cold loaded the rounds."

Max Remington: "You mean that it will have even less stopping power than it normally does just to get the same effect I could have with the MAC 10 which by itself would be more likely to incapacitate whomever I shoot?"

Boss: "Well, yeah. It's 9mm! That means that it's so incredibly easy to control that if you can hit someone with one round, well, you've practically hit him with all 30! Now, don't tell me that one round of .45 is as likely to stop someone as 30 rounds of 9mm!"

Max Remington: "You've got to be kidding."

Boss: "Actually, yes, I am. The real reason I'm doing this is that 9mm is easier to resupply since it's a bit more standard these days."

Max Remington: "What!? I'm risking my life out there! Just how many rounds do you think I'm likely to go through, anyway!? Are you on crack or something?"

Boss: "Nope. Cocaine, since I'm high class. It is the 80s after all." *snoooorrrt*