Part adventure and part submarine simulator, this
Sierra adventure from the mind of
Police Quest creator Jim Walls puts you in the shoes of a multi-qualified Commander in the United States Navy, during the late stages of the
Cold War. A hostage situation at the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia threatens to flare up into open conflict with the Soviet Union, enough to merit taking a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine from Hawaii into the Mediterranean, only to bring you (supposedly a part-time CIA operative or somesuch) ashore for a rescue operation.
The story begins in Tahiti, where your character is taking a leisurely vacation. The game's copy-protection requires you to follow precise CPR procedures to rescue a drowning woman. You later meet and spend a night with a beautiful American woman who later turns out to be a CIA agent.
You are called back from vacation to the Pentagon, where a briefing reveals the basic plot. You're then flown directly to Hawaii to board the submarine. The majority of the game is spent on the sub, and you'll be required to handle
a great variety of functions on board:
- Piloting the submarine in real-time, as well as operating its sonar, weapons, and stealth systems.
- Plotting a suitable course from Hawaii to Gibraltar under the polar ice cap.
- Decoding several encrypted transmissions, another copy-protection for the game.
- Repairing a faulty torpedo tube, manufacturing replacement parts using pretty much every piece of machinery in the boat's engineering room.
The underwater journey requires playing several long minigames, some of which are devastatingly hard to complete. This includes a battle against Soviet cruisers, battle against a Soviet Alfa-class Submarine, and piloting the sub between icebergs/stalactites underneath the north pole.
In addition, the game requires you to win several games of Yahtzee against a fellow shipmate to win a
bottle. The designers were particularly devious with this one, as saving and reloading too many times during this game will cause you to lose the match automatically (apparently, your opponent is quite smart). Doing this makes the game
Unwinnable. In fact, there are at least two other places in the game where a wrong action does not immediately cause a
Game Over, but rather lets you play on for quite some time, oblivious to your Dead Man Walking status.
After reaching Gibraltar, you will disembark from the ship using scuba gear, evading shore defenses by creating a diversion. The actual assault on the embassy at the end of the game is possibly even harder than the rest of the game, and requires quick thinking and reflexes.
This is possibly one of the most difficult Sierra adventures ever created, mostly due to the many difficult mini-games as well as the general obscurity of its puzzles, leading to
Guide Dang It!. However, the plot and writing, as well as its relative innovations at the time it was released, made it either very worthwhile or simply a piece of crap. Unfortunately, the multiple copy protection techniques (most of them requiring the original manual or a reasonable facsimile) as well as unexpected bugs render this game virtually unplayable today.
Codename: Iceman provides examples of:
- CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: You have to save a woman from the surf early on in the game, and you have to perform CPR. Afterwards she just stands up and walks it off.
- Cold War: It came out in 1989.
- Guide Dang It!: Oh so very much. Simply put, everything in the game that can go wrong, will go wrong unless you explicitly check for it. For instance, the submarine will malfunction unless you, the captain, perform maintenance work. The worst example is that, at CIA headquarters, you are given the wrong ID card. Unless you double-check it, you'll get through half the game before noticing this mistake made it Unwinnable.
- Luck-Based Mission
- Minimalist Cast: The U.S.S. Blackhawk - a U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine - seems to have a crew of 7 individuals. Including yourself.
- At one point, Captain Hawkins tells you that you can stand down from the pilot's position because your replacement shift has arrived. When you stand up, there's no one there to replace you.
- Save Scumming: If you save and load too many times during the dice minigame, your opponent refuses to abide cheaters, takes the important item you're supposed to win from him, and leaves, rendering the game unwinnable.
- Shown Their Work: This IS a Jim Walls game after all, expect realistic procedures.
- Text Parser
- Unexpected Genre Change: Several, the bulk of them occurring in the submarine: plot a course for the submarine, fight enemy submarines, pilot the submarine to dodge obstacles, and play Yahtzee with a crew member.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you refuse to help the arbitrary drowning woman at the beach, the game kills you for being an asshole.
- Writers Have No Sense Of Scale: As the U.S.S. Blackhawk sails east through the Bering Straits, Westland and Hawkins go up to the conning tower to take a look around. With his binoculars, Hawkins spots two ships on the horizon which turn out to be Russian warships, and one starts heading towards them. But when you get to your station a few minutes later, it turns out that the enemy is still about 17,000 yards away (about 15.5km) - which is well beyond visual range at sea level.
