YMMV / Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? (1997)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: One potential explanation for the Good Guides' apparent Idiot Ball is that they know just where the thieves are at, but they want you to figure it out. Especially prevalent in 1808, since Renee Santz should have spotted the sousaphone right off the bat. Of course, this doesn't excuse the Idiot Ball of the people in said-timeframe not spotting the thieves themselves.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Jacqueline Hyde. Given who she was named after, it's not a surprise to find that she has another personality, but it is a shock when her other personality expresses itself in a harsh, distorted, loud voice that comes out of nowhere.
  • Case 4, set in Heian Japan, takes place entirely at nighttime and features some fairly eerie, unsettling sounding musical tracks, particularly the track that plays when you need to adjust the last mirror in the Spring House and the track that plays inside Murasaki's dresser room with the moonlight now making the zodiac names written on the drawers visible.
  • The Jump Scare appearance of the grizzly bear in Case 15, which comes on top of you having stared down other dangers like an angry ram and a raging river.
• That One Level:
  • Case 7 (the Sahara desert) is a trial-and-error level. While every other level does have hints and help, correctly balancing the salt block is close to impossible unless you know that the second-smallest and the second-largest molds of gold are the only ones that don't need to placed on the scale.
  • Case 9, the Inca Empire case. If you're not good at math and you don't have a calculator, doing the subtraction might take a while- and then you have to remember how to correctly put the numbers down.
  • Case 10, 1493. You have to sail all the way across the Atlantic ocean, tile by tile, twice. Plus, there are the winds that can push you back in the opposite direction both ways. Even more annoying, you hear the ship bell and Rock Solid announce what direction you're heading in every time you move. Slightly mitigated by some areas of the map where the prevailing winds will move you multiple tiles at once, which can shorten the journey by about 20%. Also, when you revisit a square on the map, the arrows will still be visible, making it easier to choose your next method of movement.
  "We're now aiming toward the wild, wild west!"
  • 1776 also deserves a mention. It's one of the longest cases in the game, filled with Guide Dang It! moments (what do you mean, you can use the Minuteman's fishing pole?), and putting the Declaration of Independence back in order can easily be That One Puzzle, especially if you're not American.
  • If you are tone deaf (Hollywood or otherwise), Beethoven's era is borderline impossible to complete, and it's literally Unwinnable if you're actually deaf, although the game has a special "deaf-friendly" setting in the options menu.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: For some reason, Polly Tix gets far less screentime that any of the other Good Guides, with only two cases. Granted, one of them was That One Level, but still... She was possibly supposed to get an earlier mission inbetween Hatshepsut and Julius Caesar (which would be Dee Cryption's missing first capture), but it got scrapped in development.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • After you complete the Edison level, you're shown a photograph of modern-day New York City lit up by electric lights. Of course, the game is from 1997, so the Twin Towers are still standing.
  • In the final case, one of the clues that directs you to the present day is, "she planned to start a countdown at the latest space shuttle launch, saying the age of Vostok was old news." The space shuttle was itself retired in 2011, fourteen years after the game's release.
  • Also in the final case, the cup that the Chief has in the donut cutscene is a Solo Jazz cup. Yep, no hiding The '90s there.